Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

Amazon will eat your life - pager rotation sucks, and if your service needs babysitting, you may not have an ops team to handle the general things. What this means is that a lousy service will take your free time and interrupt your sleep one week out of 6-8. This would be as expected for a lot of things, but some services are naturally chatty (external systems, upstreams that file a pageable ticket to find out why your service is acting up, etc.). In addition, the workload can be high if you find yourself in the wrong place - choose wisely. The downside of free reign with teams is that there is often little consistency of behavior, as each team implements what it needs; this can cause problems if you need something not offered. It also impacts crosscutting concerns - coordinating multiple teams is almost impossible. Payments is a high stress area, as is anything that supports warehouses. Having been in payments, it's getting better, but I didn't get along with one or two of the managers; I got a bit burnt out, then was denied vacation that I desperately needed and tossed on a deathmarch project., so that colors my views a bit Amazon has cheap benefits (frugality is the watchword, but it burns a bit when the most significant bennie is a bus pass). On the flip side, you are paid well if you do well.

Most software groups are responsible for software that is used by a production website or service -- that means that depending on how old the software is or how well it was written or how well its operations were thought out, it can fail gracefully or not. Some groups have frontline oncall support teams, but many do not, so if the production software fails a lot, you may be on a pager rotation that can cost you some sleep :(.