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Good compensation, results-driven, a lot varies between teams

Software Development Engineer I
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for less than 1 year
June 18, 2021
Sunnyvale, California
3.0
Pros
  • Compensation is very good for an entry-level engineer position.
  • You learn a lot; you'll learn nearly every aspect of what is required to develop, deploy, and maintain a service. Even if you don't own an entire service yourself, you'll own your code.
  • You have more experienced people all around you (always true for SDE I, often true for SDE II).
  • You have some cool internal tools that help you get up-and-running with a new CI/CD application very quickly.
  • Depending on the team, you may have plentiful opportunities to work on new and/or interesting products/features/designs.
Cons
  • Not a very warm environment oftentimes; it's very results-driven. Remote working has made this more true, at least for my team.

  • Depending on the team, there may not be many opportunities put on your plate for new and/or interesting products, features, or designs. If your manager can't help this right away, the initiative will be on you to think up and present ideas/designs for potentially useful projects that you'd want to work on (while not dropping the ball on the less-interesting-but-necessary work, of course).

  • Operational load (on-call) can be stressful at times, or even all the time depending on the team. Teams track this load, so ask the hiring manager.

Advice to Management

Managers should track in 1-on-1s a timeline of the proportion of career-goal-aligned work to non-career-goal-aligned work for each team member. Tweaking a team member's work items based on this would help with retention.

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