Amazon Software Development Engineering I reviews

3.7

59% would recommend to a friend

(557 total reviews)
avatar

Andrew Jassy

40% approve of CEO

61% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineering I employees have rated Amazon with 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 557 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineering I professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineering I professionals compared to other employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

557 reviews
1.0
Oct 30, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Absolutely huge company with tons of weight in the business world.

Cons

What team you end up seems pretty random to an outsider and is a pretty opaque process. Does not invest in its people, so if you were dumped in a team that is a disaster, you'll have to wait a year to move within the company, but you probably won't stay longer than that. Work life balance is non-existent. If you're in a smaller team's on call rotation, you'll be on call for a good chunk of time (and weekends aren't counted as work time(!), even if you have to be within a half hour of logging in when you're on call). Civility is in short supply because the people that manage to last more than the median tenure (which depending on where you look is as low as a year, Amazon doesn't advertise that) have usually managed to do it by exploiting knife fighting and stack ranking. This short tenure plays into Amazon's stock vesting scheme to ensure that at least half of employees won't receive any stock options at all. If you want to do any modern development (outside of Java), prepare to fight the infrastructure for months. but, hey, they pay a lot for that first year, so maybe you'll be into that. Just don't leave before then, because there are a bunch of clawbacks to keep you stuck after you realize you've made a mistake.

4.0
Oct 24, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There is a good scope for learning in Amazon. You get to learn new technologies and understand the framework. Career opportunities are also really good. You can switch internally if you are not happy with current team.

Cons

Work-life balance may get affected. But this is specific to each team. You may be lucky to enter a team where the work load is less. If your luck is not that great, you may end up in a team with significant amount of work.

4.0
Oct 15, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

My previous job was full of time-serving pot plants, so my bar was pretty low after that, but coming to Amazon felt like a night and day improvement for a number of reasons. My standard answer when people ask me if I like working at Amazon, my answer is "the idiot ratio is low". You will be working with smart, committed people and spend a much smaller amount of time dealing with idiots than I have experienced in the past. I've now had 3 managers, 2 of which were awesome and 1 whom I think should not be a manager. One good thing about Amazon is that it's pretty easy to switch teams (after you've been in a team for a year). This allowed me to move to a manager and organization that I trusted. Amazon is very good at focusing on things that matter (hence the title of my post). The leadership principles are used every day and that is really helpful if you're a software developer to prevent people from wasting time on things that are 'cool' but don't have an impact on the real world. Yes, it means you don't get to spend lots of time refactoring code or using the latest fad NoSQL database but it does mean that that you're forced to try and maximize your impact on the customer. In the long run I feel like doing a job where your work feels valued is better than having a perfectly architected codebase.

Cons

The horror stories are true if you have a manager/org who is a slave driver. Upper management is pretty ruthless in not investing in things that don't have a direct financial impact. Hence, internal tools and development environments can feel very underdone. The oncall/pager duty situation for some teams is out of control and means you can never make any forward progress. These teams are few and far between but from my observations they are the ones with enormous turnover.

Viewing 421 - 423 of 557 Reviews

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