Taro Logo

Software Development Engineer 2

Software Development Engineer II
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 1 year
February 4, 2017
Seattle, Washington
4.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Interesting work with smart and talented people.

Great pay.

Work from home on occasion.

Cons

The bias for action company principle outweighs the others.

This result is the creation of more value at the expense of letting existing value decay; this translates to a legacy code base.

It results in people having been there the longest being the sole proprietors of the intellectual property being developed there. The rest of us get to work without much hope for growth in the short term.

This is especially exacerbated by the completely custom systems there. The learning curve is steep.

Advice to Management

There are those of us (developers) who don't mind working hard. TPMs should not be allowed to advance to manage developers. Their bias for action will always trump a developer's ability to keep our systems maintained smoothly without the need for big, expensive rewrites every 2-5 years. I know that top management looks for ways to bring down operating costs, and this is a way. It would also avoid a lot of employee turnover and frustration.

Was this helpful?

Amazon Interview Experiences