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Fast-paced, high salary, not always nice

Software Development Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 2 years
August 30, 2012
Seattle, Washington
3.0
RecommendsPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Rock-solid core business. Exceptional growth and cool projects all around. Good middle management and excellent senior/top management. Smart SDEs all around.

Cons

On-call system.

SDEs are asked to carry the pager in an on-call rotation. Depending on the team, your experience can be OK or truly a nightmare. Nightly calls if you work with an Indian team and live in Seattle.

Scrum is heavily adopted, keeping the pace very high and intense. Projects sometimes are more workarounds than fully designed solutions, as there is no time to focus on the solution. Scrum makes the due date your enemy.

Advice to Management

Keep listening, SDEs, for new ideas, as you are already doing. Move away from the on-call stuff. Hire support engineers and make the SDEs happy. Free lunch would be a nice perk.

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