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Big Company, Bad Pips

Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for less than 1 year
June 4, 2021
Vancouver, British Columbia
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

Good money. Scale is big, so you will learn about distributed systems, but most likely you will be working on DB migrations and legacy code patching.

Cons

Bad tooling for engineers.

Bad RSU vesting structure (only 5% vested in 1 year, after which they put you on a performance improvement plan to save most of the stock growth profit).

Hire-to-fire policy. You will be hired and deliberately given a vague project so you fail to meet the deadline and are put on a performance improvement plan (mandatory 10% quota for focus, a mentorship plan, and 5% for PIP - performance improvement plan, which is like an ultimatum to leave the company right away or after 1 month with less or no severance pay).

Confirmed by a manager that they have to put employees on focus and performance improvement plans otherwise, they lose their job.

Code revision statistics, like counting the number of revisions it takes you to push code, are used against you to show that you are not performing well, so you have to get your Git merge request correct the first time.

The manager has too much power. They can block internal transfers and put you on focus for taking a vacation anytime.

Frugality is supposed to be a factor for designing systems but is plaguing the employees, leading to employees being unable to expense even a headset.

Advice to Management

Please eliminate mandatory URA quotas and remove the "Do not rehire" flag for employees who have been abused by this system.

Additional Ratings

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

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