Amazon Software Engineer (Software Developer II) reviews

Culture and value put in employees are poor. Career advancement opportunities get exponentially more difficult and one sub-par review gets you in a difficult to escape dog house. Base comp is pretty low. Amazon uses it's review process to bump you up (or knock you down) based on how it levels you among your division. Amazon uses quotas to rank it's employees. Some have to be given poor ratings regardless of performance (see doghouse above). Your boss may like you but you'll still feel marginally appreciated by the company. SDE Management talent is extremely thin. The company chose to expand at any cost so turnover is extremely high, including in SDE management. Morale and fulfillment also quite poor.

Lots of crappy programmers. Blind leading the blind means many college hires get indoctrinated with bad practices Here's your choice of teams: - Small agile teams that are building cool products quickly - Massive orgs that have built themselves into corners and make every simple task take days to get right - Teams owning some of the oldest software in the company with crazy high attrition rates (think avg 6-8 months) - Teams that grew too fast and have 10 awful hacks for every good programmer, causing nightmares for whoever's on call If you're looking to work at Amazon, you NEED to talk to the manager/coworkers on the team you're being hired for. If they look defeated and sad, look elsewhere!