Software Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: The product is interesting, at least.
Cons: Engineering takes a back seat to getting releases out.
Frequently, these releases have key features (or sometimes even central features) removed to hit deadlines.
We used to have centralized quality teams, but they've been cannibalized for feature team headcount.
The result is slower development because each feature team is having to create its own operations and development tools, because what's left of devtools can't support the company anymore.
There's no good way to share these tools cross-org.
A lot of teams have insane deadlines and overwork themselves trying to hit them.
Product quality is in free-fall, and everyone's more interested in tricking Amazon into thinking we're accomplishing things than improving anything.
Quality of life is trending downward: perks are being cut, food/drinks aren't being restocked, and wage increases were below inflation last year org-wide.
Half the company's manager upline doesn't go through the CEO and instead goes through some Amazon guy now.
Things are going bad real fast.
A new building is opening up next year, but they're cutting 6 inches off everyone's desk to make it work. It's not clear how we'll fit our monitors in our workstation at that point.