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You will be Jack of all trades, master of none. I would never work here again

Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Amazon for less than 1 year
March 21, 2011
Seattle, Washington
2.0
Doesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Seemingly better pay. Stocks (But you may not stay here for 4 years to reap the benefits). Smart people.

Cons

They hire you as a Software "DEVELOPMENT" engineer and make you do everything: QA, Ops, etc.

They have short project deadlines (<1 month sometimes), which translates to excruciatingly long hours of work.

It drastically impacted my family life. Pagers support keeps you awake on a Friday night. I used to see fellow Amazonians carrying pagers to museums, parks with their family. They may have to stop having fun and work on their laptops at parks. The compensation sounds interesting for the first two years and then falls flat. They talk about frugality all the time, which means hardly any office get-togethers.

I would discourage Amazon as your future workplace unless work is everything you have in life. Not an engineer-friendly company. I moved to the Bay Area and am a very happy person now working for Google.

Advice to Management

Stop being cheap. Hire some QA and ops people. Do not make engineers do all the things and put pressure on them. Stop being frugal when top execs make billions every year.

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