Amazon Senior Software Development Engineer reviews

Poor work-life balance, redundant people management system

Which team you join makes a huge difference. Talking to a dev from the team and asking smart questions will go a long way to determining what kind of experience you have. Almost all teams have pager duty. Some teams have absolutely brutal pager duty with alerts all hours, weekends, and holidays. Some teams have absolutely terrible management culture compounded by being understaffed (because who wants to work there). If the whole team just quit or there are 10-20 people under one manager, go find something else. Nothing is ever really done (unless it's cancelled) or to high quality, for many engineering personalities this can lead to work consuming your whole life. Amazon invests as minimally as possible in infrastructure so a lot of things are poorly documented, broken, incompatible, etc. Relative to other companies they also invest pretty minimally in project management. A lot of your job is navigating the resulting chaos and many of the leadership principals are effectively about that.