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Time pressure, chaos, stress

Software Development Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Amazon for 1 year
December 29, 2021
Vancouver, British Columbia
2.0
Doesn't RecommendPositive OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Like in all other tech megacorps, compensation is above market, especially at senior positions.

Cons

The primary objective is shipping features on time, no matter how much overtime, stress, or bugs will be caused by it.

Internal tools are trash. The errors are cryptic, and the UI is buggy. People who wrote the tools have largely moved on to working on other things, so the problems will likely never get fixed.

Internal docs are trash. Half of the info is missing, and half of the info that is present is outdated.

On-call rotation sucks hard. Everyone on my team dreaded it. There are things breaking every 20 minutes, you get bombarded by problem reports and requests to fix stuff without nearly enough time to handle them all.

Overall, the work environment is not friendly or enjoyable by any means. Most people are so stressed out about their own projects that they won't be willing to help you unless you keep bugging them over and over.

Approval processes suck. You can easily spend the entire day going back and forth with approvals when trying to get a deployment done.

Their leadership principles sound nice. Too bad in practice they aren't adhered to.

Advice to Management

Don't focus so much on the deadlines. Make sure employees don't dread on-call.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
1.0
Culture and Values
1.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
3.0
Career Opportunities
4.0
Compensation and Benefits
5.0
Senior Management
1.0

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