Amazon

Amazon is a fantastic place to work, if you find the right team. However, this is much more easily said than done.

I was placed on a random team after a generic new grad application, and the first team was horrible: tough on-call, zero senior engineers, a rotating door of leadership and managers. At this point, I was really questioning if I wanted to fully leave or not, so I decided to try out another team, finding a project I was more passionate about. That worked, and I was able to switch to an absolutely fantastic team for around a year and a half, with a light on-call burden, a focus on really mentoring engineers and helping them learn, and most importantly to me, an awesome project.

That being said, it all came to an end because, more often than not, if Amazon is not seeing immediate revenue from a project, even if the specific industry it's targeting is known to take a long time to trust a new product, it will shut it down. So, unfortunately, that is what happened to my team, and sadly, that seems quite common here.

Then, they will shuffle you with no say to other teams in the organization and hope that a square peg fits a round hole.

Even though getting moved around sucked, I had a great time on that team, so I have to give credit where credit is due. Being on that team for a year and a half, I learned so much, created great lifelong connections, and was able to be promoted.

So, even though in my experience and through friends' experiences I see there are a disproportionate amount of bad teams, like I mentioned earlier, there are some diamonds in the rough where you can grow and develop yourself with great people.

• Pay is great.
• Benefits are pretty solid, but nothing crazy.
• Promotion process can be annoying to deal with, depending on your manager, but for the most part, it's pretty structured. This changes depending on your level and title, obviously, but it's better than just being promoted because you are friends with your manager.
• Although I made the team switching seem negative (which, when it's forced or away team work, it is!), it's also a positive to a certain degree. As a recent grad, you may be unsure of what exactly you want to do in software. Amazon is so big and mobile that you can hop around to different teams to really find what you love to do.
• Great selling point for future interviews and jobs. Amazon/AWS is a well-known name, and most companies will chomp at the bit for AWS engineers.
• When you find the right team, it is a fantastic learning experience, with plenty of knowledge from these great engineers.

Some advice is to stay away from teams with no senior engineers (SDE III or higher). SDE IIIs are fantastic for learning from and have more weight when going to bat for the team against leadership.

The average co-worker will be on your team for less than a year; churn is high, which is depressing because work and knowledge get lost.

In the 2.5 years that I worked at the company, I had 6 different managers and was on 4 different teams.

Only one team switch was by my own will. I knew I was performing well because I was promoted fairly quickly and kept getting "exceeds bar" on reviews. It seems leadership only cares about meeting headcount sometimes, and if one team is below on headcount, they will ship you off on an "away team" or just straight up move you. They don't care what projects you will actually care about.

The jump to get from SDE II to SDE III is seemingly impossible. Many people treat SDE II as a terminal position, which can get depressing.

Promoting externally is very big at Amazon. I have a friend who really should have been making more money, and the comp review got him nowhere near that number, so he left. When he came back only a few months later, they offered him way higher than what he was making. It's very likely that in 2 years (or less), new hires will be making more than you (depending on your level).

The golden handcuffs are real. Many people I talked with are so scared of leaving because they have X dollars on the table. That number will only ever get higher, so if you have a better offer or are unhappy, leave. Sadly, many people I know have denied great offers because "If I stay around 1 year, I get all this money," and then when they get it, Amazon puts more on the table for 3 years down the line.

Diversity in certain organizations is pretty low.

Don't play down the On-Call horror stories; they are real and they are terrible for your mental health. Towards the tail end of my time at Amazon, I was on a team that was getting paged 30 times a week with an absolutely massive ticket queue.

Some teams do not have any senior developers. If you see a team full of SDE I's and you are an SDE I, they will pitch it to you as, "We're a young team, and you'll get all these opportunities." RUN THE OTHER WAY. This is absolutely not true. Either leadership is not willing to promote people in a timely manner, or they can't find any senior engineers to work on the project because it's not a good project. Additionally, you need mentorship as an SDE I, and sometimes leadership will not listen to an SDE I when going over designs.

At the end of the day, to Amazon, you are a headcount, not an engineer with wants and desires.

If you treat engineers like people who have a passion for a specific field, they will perform better. Engineers are not numbers that can be shuffled around projects; this only leads...