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Hard place to start, but really rewarding

Software Developing Engineer I
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 2 years
July 26, 2015
Seattle, Washington
4.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Given big responsibility from the start, which is great. There is a lot of trust towards developers.

You won't be given useless projects. Everything is used.

A lot of communication between the business side of a project and the tech side.

Unique, challenging, and interesting problems to solve (although this could vary depending on which part of Amazon).

Values aren't just posted on the walls; they're drilled into everything you do.

Easy to transfer internally to a new job (requires at least a year between teams and a good performance review).

Relative transparency between manager and employees. Although it's only with your direct superior, there isn't much interaction with anyone higher than that.

Use of new and relevant technologies (i.e., they're not stuck using outdated languages/stacks). I'm sure this varies from team to team though.

This sounds trivial, but the office chairs are amazing. They did not skimp on those.

It's generally easy to work remotely. Although it's not really encouraged, it is doable.

Being able to bring a dog is awesome. Seriously, a huge benefit.

Cons

Frugality is the one value that you will end up hating. They abuse it to the point of being cheap. Pretty much all the negatives about the company stem from this single value.

The development environment you get isn't that great (although they're slowly getting better). Laptops and desktops just don't have enough processing power to do what they need to do, and they JUST started issuing dual-monitors as standard.

Growing too fast. Some buildings are filled to the brim. They had to take down the interior walls in some buildings to make room for more people to fit. It literally can feel like a factory sometimes.

  • No parking on campus
  • The campus itself is honestly really boring. It's boring to look at, and it doesn't have anything to make it stand out.
  • Managers are hit and miss. They seem to only care about how they look and not how their employees are doing.
  • Really tough for those coming right out of college. No one is going to tell you to stop working, so it's incredibly easy to get burned out. The amount of pressure you can receive from your manager is scary.
  • Way too much bureaucracy (aka too many meetings).
  • Internal tools have a really high learning curve.
Advice to Management

Instead of being just a mouthpiece for the higher-ups, try learning more about the people who answer to you. Relationships build trust. Repeating Amazon's values at me isn't going to make me better at my job.

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