Amazon Software Development Manager reviews

Very hierarchical and dominated by PMs. Mid-level management, in-flighting, dog-eat-dog politics is worse than any other Fortune 50 places I've seen. Highly stressful and certainly not worth sticking around for the money.

If you are joining as external candidate, please note that Amazon hiring bar is different than internal promotion bar. So in the hiring process, they will insist you need 10 years for L6, 15 for L7 etc, but internally there are folks with L6 at 5, L7 at 8-10. Hiring bar is also" better than 50% at a particular level", but promotion bar is only entry level of a bracket. This means that you will slowly move from imposter syndrome to Dunning–Kruger as you work with internally grown colleagues. For external hires, cultural adjustments will also take sometime. Overall you may end up growing slowly than your internal peers even after clearing so-called 50% bar. If you are working in non-Seattle locations, especially eastern economies, there are chances that some of the management have made their way in through middle level companies and they are making big money as Amazon has expanded big time with bloated egos. Providing insights to them is not easy. "Learn and Be Curious" leadership principle is regularly violated if you are coming from outside and have your suggestions/opinions. You will hear things to the tone of "This is what we do at Amazon" Amazon has met with lots of success recently, but from a bar perspective they are equivalent to other companies like Microsoft, Paypal, Adobe etc, despite what they tell you.