Amazon

Universal Pros

• Amazon gives you relocation. It sponsors visas, pays for your move, and even gives a starting bonus. This is good if you live in a 2nd/3rd world country and are looking for a high-profile company on your CV. Amazon is always hiring from every part of the world, so you have a chance no matter where you live or what your background is, to some extent, I guess. Also, you can choose where—in which country and city—to join upon applying for a position.
• You get to see how Amazon builds and runs software, and this is very valuable for an engineer.
• There are many things going on around, and you may entertain yourself observing.
• You can switch teams easily. You can choose between AWS, Amazon, Amazon Devices, Audible, and a bunch of other businesses.
• The company is built on ingenious but simple principles that allow it to stay itself and expand like crazy. It is worth seeing that from the inside.
• You don't have to be super smart or super techy to make a good career there.

Berlin Pros

• The salary is good compared to the majority of Berlin IT companies.
• It is easy to travel to Seattle HQ or other offices. You can even switch teams and relocate after some time.

Universal Cons

• Everything you do is duct tape. Don’t mention “quality” - you won’t be understood. Don’t plan your work beyond 20% that brings most (or none) of the result; it won’t go beyond that.

• Nobody cares. New joiners see that nobody cares and pick that up too. There’s a leadership principle called “Ownership,” but Ownership is a joke.

Goals are the only exception. Once something becomes a goal, people start noticing and caring about it.

• People who want to grow optimize for their promotion (because of the two above). You find yourself doing absurd stuff, people talking and articulating specifics but ignoring the big picture, people not noticing the obvious. That’s not always because your manager or senior engineers are stupid; that’s because they are gaining specific points for their promo.

Your peers don’t know what to do for their career growth. They will optimize unnecessary things and try to impede you if they think you’re getting points ahead of them. Official promotion requirements exist but are only looked at for formulation to decline. Unofficially, it is simple: you need to do only what your managers want and as quickly as possible if you want to get to the next level.

• Bad Software Development Managers; many more bad managers than good ones (more below).

• Watch out for the Non-Competition Agreement if you start in the US. It is better to ask and read it before you accept the offer. Ask about the Open-Source contribution policy beforehand also.

• It is hard to make friends with peers. People quickly turn unwelcome by default.

• Happiness of employees is never a priority at Amazon. I never read in the press or heard that Amazon wants to see happy employees. You won’t become happier than you were before joining.

• Amazon is the worst place I have worked in terms of trust in people in little things. Your trust and common sense are raped and betrayed on a daily basis. Some people might live okay with it though.

• You won’t find a big mission for Amazon. Leadership Principles only cover how Amazon is doing what it’s doing, not why. Being the most customer-centric company isn’t also the “why.” Amazon exists because it brings good money and, perhaps, it is entertaining to do experiments at a large scale (this is called “big opportunities” in managers’ slang).

• Amazon is a managers’ organization. You better hide your opinion if you want to make a career as an engineer. I have seen how the smartest senior and principal engineers swallow whatever nonsense managers come up with and execute on that.

• Growing as a Software Engineer, you will not get more power over people. You get more technical scope of work to do and a higher level of technical decisions to make, but you can’t actually make other engineers follow your vision. You influence without command because command is only a manager’s job. This makes a phenomenon that as Software Engineers grow, they learn how to look responsible (everybody likes credits) without actually carrying responsibility (nobody likes incident calls) for larger systems. Principal engineers become a special caste on their own, already distant from SDE I and IIs, but not quite welcome in the managers’ camp.

Berlin Cons

• Watch out for folks who came from the US and don’t plan to stay. These will ride you for their career till the last drop of your blood.

• Most intelligent people in the office are most unwelcome.

• Higher % of lazy people than in the US.

• Hard to find anybody with balls.

Worst thing in Amazon is managers, in my opinion. They deserve a few special words. Managers are consistently unprofessional in both management and engineering.

I’ve been at several managers’ interviews. Manager candidates are not asked any worthwhile technical questions. A mediocre engineer with three to five years of experience would easily pass that technical bar.

It is mainly checked whether they made “right” decisions in different situations. Loyalty to the system is the thing that matters most.

For people not familiar with Amazon’s organization type, every engineering team with 4-15 people has a Software Development Manager. This person is responsible for running the team. This person does not have a formally defined reference of work and practically has the last word in every question. Managers are receiving special trainings and information not available to other employees. That makes them a special caste; they tend to distance themselves from reports and hang out with other managers.

In the few years I worked, I had managers ranging from silly to plain stupid, from whip crackers to highly organized anti-social types, liars, and place seekers. Two-thirds were very weak technically and not learning, yet respected by higher leads and regularly getting promotions. Only once did I get a manager who was both good technically, in personal communication, getting along with people, and making a team. If you’re lucky to get a good SDM, stick to him or her and don’t let them go.

Nobody at Amazon would change anything because of Glassdoor advice. People who could change things don’t bother to read Glassdoor; they have much more important problems, like how to spend their millions.