Amazon Software Engineer (Software Developer II) reviews

* Work life balance can be an issue. * Cross-team collaboration can be difficult due to lack of spare cycles.

From engineer to senior managers, even PM, none of them care much about UI/UX, quoting from the management "I don't care about how the product will look like, just make it work first, we can worry about UI later", speaking of "working backward" that company often encourage, in Amazon way is to write a 10+ page of design document, spend 10 hours of reviewing it, rewrite your document several times because your manager doesn't like the introduction paragraph, then later at some point someone says "The navigation flow is not clear to me". The attrition rate is ridiculous, the people who did the welcome lunch for you most probably won't be the same ones doing the farewell lunch, 50% of people leave within the first year, 80% within the second, from my experience I'd say it's more than that. Instead of real engineering work, if you prefer to spend most of your time writing emails, doing operational work and playing corporate games to get the promotion then Amazon is probably for you. Oh, and good luck to stick with the same manager that can vouch for your promotion, either you changed the team or they change the manager for you.