- Healthcare and Benefits: from what I hear from my friends working at other tech companies, Amazon pretty much has nothing. Just nothing.
- Work Equipment: horrible. I am still using the Macbook from 2011 and not allowed to upgrade to newer machine until 2017. I would have to pay out of my pocket for memory upgrade and switch from normal hard drive to ssd. Of course, all in the name of "Frugality". I am just not sure how it can be frugal where I have to spend a lot of time waiting for things to run and process while on the clock. And once upon a time, we were so looking forward to acquire monitor from interns who are about to leave, because Amazon would refuse to give us two monitors of 22". Luckily, at least that's over.
- Performance Review and Salary: I have had many reviews so far and it always seems subjective. Like April this year, I got exceed for engineer rating and solid for leader principle, and I got <2% pay raise. Total compensation, stock included, goes down from last year. In another word, I get a pay cut for a good performance review. Who does that? Talked to manager and HR, nothing they can do about it. And thanks to Glassdoor, I know that I am underpaid even comparing to other engineers at the same level at the SAME company.
- Retention rate is very low. My department is considered one of the good one in term of work life balance and everybody is nice and such, But people keep leaving. Business keeps asking for projects to be built while we don't have enough resources and don't even care about operational support. They just want things to be done for their own promotion, then get promoted, and leave the burden behind. Engineers are quoted on their words about "rough/initial" estimation and got pressured onto that "promises" to get things done. Inexperienced engineers make that amateur mistakes all the times and burn themselves out. Engineers like me stay in the department because of promises about promotion, different and interesting project, but of course pay raise is kinda out of question but only for a very few people. (Perhaps I am not that good of an engineer. If so, why even bother rating me exceed in engineer performance many years in a row?)
- Technical challenge: not much. Once you passed the first 1 or 2 years of learning as new hires, it pretty much dies down from there.
- Pager (it especially sucks if your team has less than 5 people. That means you would be oncall once a month or more)
- Mentor: hit and miss. I am fortunate to have some very great mentors. But my friends seem to have a complete opposite of spectrum. He has to learn everything, plays nice with his mentor although that mentor is not even helpful.
- Managers and some engineers tend to present the Amazon's problem in a very engineer way: it is not perfect and very challenging but there will always be room for improvement and you can contribute to that. Sure, it's possible, if only you work their days and nights, weekend included to get your work done and achieve those goals.
You probably ask why I am still working there after so many complaints I made above. Well, I love my teammates. They are some of the best engineers I have had a chance to work with. They are all moving on now. I am the last man standing. Prepping for the interviews now. If you are working for Amazon, move on, NOW. If you plan to work for Amazon, at least ask for the ton of money or a very special project. Last word, just get out.
