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Not great, but not terrible either

Software Development Engineer I
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 2 years
August 5, 2014
Seattle, Washington
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Pay is some of the best in the industry for a new grad, up there with Google and MS. Benefits are decent.

Most teams work normal 40-hour weeks, unless you get unlucky enough to get put on a team with an insane workload or on-call rotation.

Cons

The culture hates developers and treats them like second-class citizens. Due to Jeff Bezos's obsession with miserliness (which he mistakenly calls "frugality"), you will be given one standard monitor, one slow desktop, and one slow laptop with not enough RAM. If you want anything else, take it from an intern's desk after they leave, or buy it yourself.

In the same vein, funding to fix "developer pain" issues is non-existent. Could everyone's job satisfaction or productivity be vastly improved by having a few developers work on environment, tooling, or build system issues? It doesn't matter! You can either voluntarily spend your free time working on it, or do without. Actually, lots of business-critical internal tooling is maintained this way, by "volunteers". Be prepared for tools you use every day to fall over when whatever random guy maintains them leaves the company! Management doesn't care. All hail "frugality"!

Your manager will probably technically be a former engineer. But teams are informally run by business people here, not engineers. They love to strong-arm engineering managers into committing to dates for project launches without spending an appropriate amount of time investigating and scoping out the work.

Oh, and the main reason projects take so long is because given a choice between spending two months on doing something correctly and one month on some horrible hack that makes it kinda work but convolutes your entire architecture, guess what the non-technical people who run your org will pick EVERY time... It's gotten to the point that we have business code no one understands or is willing to touch, simply by "death by a thousand cuts" with no time ever allocated for refactoring.

Don't even get me started on the space... I hope for your sake that you get put in one of the new buildings that are "only" normal high-density seating, not Amazon high-density seating. Otherwise, your work environment will sound like a high school cafeteria and be about as productive.

Advice to Management

Give engineers what they want!

You have a tech employees' survey; actually listen to it, even if it would cost you a bit more money.

Giving programmers nice tools and offices would already go a long way towards happiness, and cost you barely anything as a percentage of salary.

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