Amazon

• COMPENSATION IS OK (not great) Even with the high stock price, there are plenty of other tech companies that offer higher compensation. This is partially because of the stock vesting schedule (5/15/40/40).

• RESUME BOOSTER I am applying to other companies, and my callback rate is > 75%.

• AWS AS YOUR PLAYGROUND This can be a good learning experience. It is definitely awesome not being limited by cost and having internal tools that help you set up an AWS account for your new service relatively quickly.

• DECENT LOCATION NEAR DOWNTOWN SEATTLE I am as critical of Seattle as any transplant, but 2 years later, it is home, and I can appreciate being close to the shopping, food, and entertainment nearby.

• OPPORTUNITIES TO TRY OUT DIFFERENT DOMESTIC/INTERNATIONAL OFFICES

• WORK-LIFE BALANCE IS ABYSMAL

It is normal to see various SDM's/TPM's sending out emails on the weekends. During a month-long stretch, it was normal for another SDE and myself, on the same project, to stay until 8 PM at the earliest and online until midnight. Even if we were the only two in the office, or it was a normal work week with no deadlines coming up, it was normal to see other engineers/managers on Chime that late anyway.

• PAINFUL TRANSFERRING PROCESS

Let's say enough is enough and you try to move to a different team. This new team will have access to your code reviews/commits, which is a true gauge of your work, but some still decide that they need to give you formal interviews. In fact, some will have 22-year-olds conducting these "formal" interviews that are not formal in the slightest. They will do things that would not fly in any external formal interview, like not stating the question correctly, not booking a room for the interview, being 15 minutes late for the interview, or asking where you're from, which is a HUGE HR no-no. This is the interview experience you get when the only thing you need to be qualified for an interview is attending two interview sessions.

Also, despite the fact that you guys are technically coworkers and should stay professional, and despite the fact that sometimes you are down the hall from each other and see each other every day, you will be ghosted by certain hiring managers during the transfer process, even if he/she showed signs of interest before. So, you are left on your bad team trying to find a better team, with no professional guidance/correspondence from your prospective team, and are forced to find a different team.

I have also seen employees put on a PIP on one team, only to excel on their new team, which goes to show that one size does not fit all. However, the new promotion process requires a sign-off to transfer, which you can see would lead to more politics in blocking the transfer, which is morbidly ironic if one of the reasons you're leaving in the first place is politics.

• HIGH TURNOVER

Good luck figuring out that service with no documentation because it was written by someone who was in the same boat as you, trying to figure out a service that someone who left for greener pastures wrote a long time ago. You know turnover is bad when your team that had 5 devs and 2 PMs leave within 1.5 years was the team with the LEAST turnover in your time at Amazon.

• TOO MANY NEW GRADS

You just got an offer from Amazon out of college, right? You're on top of the world and feel like you're the smartest person in the room, right? Of course you're going to take it; you're from flyover country, and six figures is a lot of money, right? Well, thousands of other new grads across the country thought the same thing and are going to start at the same time as you.

Amazon is expanding rapidly, and so Amazon needs hungry grads. As a new grad, it's luck of the draw for what team you end up on. So, if you're lucky, you'll get a manager who realizes there needs to be a healthy ratio of experienced SDE2/3s and SDE1s. But chances are, you'll end up with a manager who just wants to throw headcount at everything to build an empire, or is just part of a bad team that no seasoned dev wants to join, so they need any body they can get, and you end up on a team with one recently joined SDE2 and five SDE1s. This is not a great environment with which to start your career, since you won't have ideal mentoring.

Moreover, there is already a huge lack of professionalism in tech, but this is exacerbated when the average age is so young, and you have to remind your younger peers that the Chime team room is not a place for profanities or inappropriate jokes.

• HIGHLY DIVERSE YET HIGHLY SEGREGATED

This is not specific to Amazon and is somewhat of a problem in tech in general, but Amazon is still guilty of this. Amazon employs thousands of employees from different countries. While diversity is a good thing and I have learned a lot about different countries from teammates, this still leads to a lot of segregation in that you'll see people walking only around SLU within their own ethnic group, speaking in their native language. This is not a problem in and of itself; of course, you want to socialize with people like yourself, but it translates to politics in the workforce, and it is not uncommon for you to see managers with only people from their ethnic group as reports. If you have any friends who are underrepresented minorities at Amazon, you will probably hear some stories, e.g., how a female friend is treated by certain ethnic groups with negative views of women, or another friend of an underrepresented ethnic group being mistaken for a janitor despite being a high-performing SDE, or just general backwards thinking that only Caucasian people can be American, and everyone else is from their country of ethnic origin. Note that not everybody contributes to this issue, and I am for diversity, but from some bad apples, it is significant enough of a problem to be worth mentioning.

• POLITICS

I've seen managers with abysmal tech survey results, zero trust from their business customers or their engineers, managers who systematically prevent their SDEs from promoting so they can't leave (or put them on a Performance Improvement Plan if they try to anyway), and zero proof that they have any idea of what's going on. Get promoted within a year or two just because they were in that position long enough, or they kissed their manager's butt the right way, or even just get promoted so they can move to another org and stop being a toxic factor in the current org. Which is not how meritocracy should work.

• INCONSISTENT PROMOTION BAR

Unfortunately, the new promo doc was supposed to make things more decoupled from managers and give more power to the engineers to drive things. Unfortunately, it is still very coupled to the manager/skip manager/org. I have seen SDEs get promoted a year out of college doing nothing but ops and bug fixes, with maybe a single project to pad the resume. I have seen industry hires with 10 years XP not being able to reach SDE2 despite leading brand new initiatives from scratch, raising the bar, and occasionally working at an SDE3 level (only for some to leave to more prestigious companies like Google/Facebook). I have seen managers who have promoted engineers on work they have only done on their prior team; I have also seen managers who are not willing to acknowledge what the engineer did on their prior team, essentially making it all for naught and forcing the SDE to jump more hoops in their current team and give the engineer less time to get promoted before they get fired.

• OVERALL TOXIC CULTURE

I went from being a bright-eyed, youthful, optimistic college grad hungry to utilize my newfound skills and contribute to the world... to a jaded 24-year-old who is afraid to wake up every morning and go to work. I have attempted antidepressants as a formality, but the only antidepressant that works is taking time off work. It is not just myself that has changed, but I have also seen friends go from happy young kids to shells of what they used to be. Joining Amazon with them has felt like the Hunger Games where even if you win, you're still part of a game that shouldn't be played in the first place, and you've lost so much on the way there. So, while a few of my friends have gotten promoted in under a year and a half, they had to work 80-hour weeks and deal with high ops and personal sacrifices to get there.

I have had managers chime me on my PTO days.

I have had a manager tell me to be more like the guy that stays up till midnight every night.

I have had a manager call me to chew me out on whether I am really working from home (when I am literally on the VPN checking emails).

I have had a manager call me when I'm at home extremely ill on antibiotics, skeptically questioning why my antibiotics are taking so long to be effective (because I'm in control of how long they should take), and skeptically questioning if I am really that sick, so I can come back to work and get stuff done.

I have had managers assign deadlines to do a project in a month that would take 3 developers 3 months to complete, then refuse to acknowledge and push back the deadline when I state that I cannot finish the task by the deadline in 2 weeks.

I have had managers attempt to put other engineers on a PIP not because they deserved it, but because they questioned the current manager, only for the engineer to leave and excel at their new role and be promoted.

I have had a manager remind me that I only have a few years to get a promotion before Amazon fires me, while also giving me scraps that do not help me with my promotion document. Imagine being between a rock and a hard place where you need to get promoted or you're fired, but don't have the work/means to get promoted.

Overall, I would stay away from Amazon unless you are 110% sure you are ending up on the very few teams where you can grow as an engineer with minimal politics.

• Listen to your engineers for deadlines.
• Foster a positive learning environment; have a healthy senior/junior SDE ratio.
• Listen to the tech survey results.
• Skip managers; have monthly meetings with your skip-level reports. You might be the only one who can listen to complaints about their direct manager who can make a difference.
• Your reports are real people with real careers; care about that. Most cities where Amazon operates are expensive; money matters. If you don't think the SDE deserves the promotion to get the compensation raise, give your employee a clear path on how to get there and work that fulfills this path.