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Luck of the draw for team, tasks, managers, and mentors

Software Development Engineer (SDE)
Former Employee
Worked at Amazon for 1 year
July 23, 2021
Vancouver, British Columbia
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Pay is pretty sweet, usually on the high-end of industry.

Cons
  • Depending on the team, your 'Software Development Engineer' role might be more of a quality-assurance, dev ops, or sys-admin role.
  • Seniority and office politics often take precedence over project-level experience.
  • Lacks a culture of openness and compassionate mentorship. Many senior developers are prone to brushing junior developers off, citing a lack of research on the junior developers' part when they themselves have no knowledge.
  • Poor documentation and horrendous in-house tooling exist amongst certain legacy applications, with extremely disturbing code hygiene.
Advice to Management

Don't assign junior developers grunt work on obscure and niche, poorly-designed systems that the team lacks subject matter knowledge in.

Don't discount junior developers' suggestions and their understanding of systems, services, and tools based on their fewer years of experience.

Increase documentation efforts, and ensure all tutorial and learning resources work. Practice proper programming and code hygiene, for example:

  • Ensure all packages and services have incremental builds.
  • Don't have unused code files in production packages.
  • Don't have tutorial packages searchable due to the same naming convention as production code.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
2.0
Culture and Values
2.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
2.0
Career Opportunities
4.0
Compensation and Benefits
5.0
Senior Management
2.0

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