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Worst place to work for

SDE-II
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 1 year
January 30, 2018
Seattle, Washington
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros
  1. Free bananas
  2. Good initial compensation
  3. Very easy to get hired. You may impress Bar Raiser by solving FooBar and get hired. Sometimes they even hire you after just a single HackerRank round.
  4. It's good only if you have a plan to leave within a year.
Cons
  1. Very easy to get fired.
  2. Bad promotion process. Lucky ones get promotion within a year; unlucky ones get 4+ years.
  3. 0-5% increment, which is almost discouraging.
  4. Leadership leaves the team very frequently, and so SDEs' efforts get wasted.
  5. You will always hear that this is a VP-level project. You work 7-8 months on the project, and suddenly the project gets de-prioritized.
  6. Worst hiring practices are followed. Leaders don't know how to hire people; they always compromise quality to accomplish their goals and then fire.
  7. I would say it's kind of an ego issue with Amazon. They have completely forgotten their values and are not innovating anything, rather than just doing useless things to remain in the market.
  8. Amazon will disappear in the coming decade, so it's not good for the long term.
Advice to Management

Understand the value of SDEs. Your team/org/company may run without HR/PM/TPMs, but it can't run without SDEs. Focus more on SDEs. Never fire any SDEs, as they are least paid and contribute the most. SDEs literally work 14 hours a day, and still, they don't get noticed just because they lack in presenting themselves to you. Though they still understand your systems in-depth and definitely have a better understanding of E-2-E systems.

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