Amazon Software Development Engineer II reviews

Very customer oriented, product comes first.

I would give 1 star but it's not Hell itself, so... Bad communication throughout teams, areas. Chaos in maintaining old solutions or very slow and hacky to moving to new solutions. Not cutting edge technology at all. Maan, if you think Amazon is supposed to be a very cool tech company with the newest tech and newest cloud-based lightweight tricks, no. It's super old. You won't progress. If you leave Amazon you'll be having this big name on your resume and no knowledge of current technologies, you will s_ck at frameworks, languages, take-home assignments, new protocols, tools. They have a continuous lay-off plan going on. Every half year or year they will kick out one member of your team, and you could be that person. It's called dev plan, dev list, coaching plan, any name and then another step after that is PIP. PIP is impossible to get out of. Coaching plan is 60-70% lay-off possibility. They don't care about outliers, if you're an exception or a good engineer just couldn't show results. If your manager is against you, you stand no chance. If he/she's with you, he/she is risking themselves to be laid off. Everyone is on themselves, on their own. You all pray to stay and be all right. Promotion documents are hard to make and you have to be a friend of your manger to be promoted, you'll wait a looot. Principles are bullsh_t. The only principle Amazon has is Deliver Results. On-call hours in some teams are very very hard. You'll be called so many times with hard problems you can't solve or finish in time. Some AWS teams have over 20 issues in a week that have to be handled within 15 minutes and solved as fast as you can. Amazon is very cheap. You don't get perks. You get the cheapest hotels if you go for a meeting in another city, IF you manage to book in time. You don't get raises or bonuses. Some teams can get a team budget approved for a nice one-day fun but some teams don't do this at all. I can't even.