Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(209,096 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

50% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Amazon has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 209,096 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Amazon employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

209K reviews
3.0
Aug 17, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The opportunity to work on projects that have great impact both internally and externally. Ability to move around the business and not get pigeonholed into a particular function/job. Should be a more formal process... People think you work at a great company and are very impressed when you tell them you work at Amazon...that is unless they know better. (i.e. ex-Amazonian or know someone at Amazon)

Cons

Lack of work/life balance. Burnout is the order of the day here. You are considered a slacker or not committed, if you work 40 hours on a regular basis. The benefits are average. They are not comparable to Microsoft's coverage. The compensation and stock grants could also use a boost. Heavy reliance on the stock grants in lieu of salaries. This weighs heavily on their retention problem. People are leaving left and right. They bail as soon as their stock vests, if not sooner. Their selection and development of the management team is a bit scary. Some people should not be managers. What criteria is used to promote people into a manager role?...Communication across the company sucks...little documentation, lack of formal processes, training etc. Too much focus on metrics and goals in each siloed department. Groups that work closely together are at odds with each other because their metrics and goals conflict with each other.

4.0
Aug 16, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

High quality and dedication of employees. Interesting and challenging technical problems: scale AND (application) complexity. Cooperative working environment; not excessively political. Amazon still has a lot of new things left to do. Frugailty is taken seriously: the work's the thing. Totally. Seattle is a great place to live.

Cons

Difficulty being able to leap-frog the state of the art. On-call can be very draining. Compensation is only average (but at least it seems to be average). Benefits aren't stellar. "It's still day one" gets tiresome. Frugality is taken pretty seriously: no frills (i.e. no free anything). Hard to publish or get permission to talk about work outside the company.

2.0
Aug 14, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Money - once you have 2 years in, the salary plus stock is very competative - High visibility product - Technology focused - Smart people - Freedom to make technological decisions (i.e. not centrally mandated) - good performance review process -- highly based on peer feedback

Cons

- promotion is difficult past a certain point -- very few job levels - many engineers young and arrogant -- it is a culture of arrogance - poor communiation of company direction or vision - most employees will not feel valued by their senior management - no perks. Frugality means no t-shirts, free pop, or even subsidy of the cafes. Bare bones work environment.

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Glassdoor has 250,424 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.