Amazon.com Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – 1) Working with a lot of smart people
2) Learn a lot in you field

Cons – 1) Hectic work environment and will be very difficult in the initial years

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com

Pros – It was a lot of fun working for the company, and spending time learning a lot of new types of things.

Cons – You work lots of long hours, which cuts into your family time, and creates more stress for you and everyone else.

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – There are lots of opportunities to learn and try different jobs. Coworkers are smart and motivated. The company thinks long term and is constantly innovating. Employees are empowered to drive change.

Cons – The company lacks processes in certain areas. Training is limited but getting better. Good place if you like to work in an unstructured environment.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep up the good work.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – I feel happy to work for Amazon.com. management is employee friendly. It's all about customers and their satisfaction.

Cons – Considers only metrics even though you have a good process knowledge.
Should increase the pay scale. No other cons found.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for less than a year

Pros – Opportunities to influence change are abundant. Continuous change, so if you don't like something...just wait around a bit. Lots of OT during the holidays.

Cons – Long days. Can be stressful depending on your position. Lots of OT during the holidays.

Advice to Senior Management – Try to be as transparent as possible...it allows your associates to accept change easier.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for less than a year

Pros – Being full time, you do receive great benefits--health, paid time off, vacation time, etc.
You get to work with a lot of different people. And get to know a lot of people as time goes on.
As well there are times to do culture activities.

Cons – Due to working in a warehouse setting, lines or sorters get jammed here and there, thus stopping the work flow. As well after peak season, managers get rotated and you have to get used to various managing styles.

Advice to Senior Management – Keep a balance among shifts when it comes to overtime, sometimes it feels some shifts get more and others get out of overtime. As well have processes in place when it comes to doing skip pick auditing (i.e. one shift has auditors turn into leads, another to someone else).

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com as an intern for more than a year

Pros – - Smart People. Barring the odd SDE/SDET, the vast majority of engineers at Amazon are really smart, motivated people who just get how things should be built
- You get to deal with really crazy problems of scale that few companies ever think about (except MS, Google, Apple and Facebook)
- If you know how to fix something, you just go and fix it
- AWS documentation is excellent with well-defined and well thought-out APIs
- Huge fleet (of machines) at your command.
- Agile and fast-moving with minimal bureaucracy
- Seattle is a beautiful city
- Great focus on the customer

Cons – - Company Culture of frugality is sometimes taken to an extreme when developers can't even get proper hardware to develop/test on sometimes
- Some Software Managers and Technical Program Managers don't necessarily meet the same quality bars that SDEs meet
- During peak times, long working hours are the norm
- Oncall means that you can be paged at 3am to solve a problem on the Website/Backend. Depends heavily on which team you work on.
- Lots of legacy code that keeps breaking resulting in people being paged frequently to fix problems. Teams that don't tackle technical debt means that these problems will continue to plague certain teams in the company. Other teams manage to get this right though.

Advice to Senior Management – Equip developers with the resources they need to succeed at times.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Very smart people. You will get to work with many high achievers from both the engineering and business worlds. Engineers get to learn a lot about business and see how high-achieving business managers function. Business managers get to work with and see how industry-leading engineering teams work.

Cons – Ridiculously hard to get promoted. You're more likely to see incompetent managers get hired into positions that they don't want to promote you to. Performance reviews and compensation systems are set up to allow the company to work you harder and pay you as little as they can get away with. Basically, you will only get a promotion or a decent raise when you work so hard that management runs out of excuses not to reward you properly. Very top-down management style. Every engineer's goals are the result of his or her manager's business goals which are trickled down from the "S-team" - the top level VPs of the company, and so bottom and mid-level creative initiatives tend not to happen. Engineers have to deliver on project after project with overly aggressive deadlines, support a huge operational load (i.e. pagers going off in evenings and weekends), and are then held accountable for quality-related issues. Many teams with bloated mid-level managers who demand lots of meetings, book keeping, reporting etc. TPMs and Dev Managers have to depend on tribal knowledge and personal networking to get anything done. Company emphasizes "Leadership Principles" which are the basis for how everyone ought to behave, but is vague and contradictory and only gives the impression - to those who drink the Kool-aid - that the company appreciates hard work as well as results, but in reality, they're no different from any other company who stack ranks their employees based on all sorts of subjective opinions. Reviews are full of BS and are mostly written after ratings have been determined. Eventually, the only engineers with rewarding careers at Amazon tend to be the fortunate ones whose managers know how to game the system, rather than play along with it. Everybody else eventually leaves - burned out and under-appreciated.

Advice to Senior Management – Shift the culture away from top-down, middle-management-heavy dynamics, and start fostering more focused and creative teams from below. Reward more. Promote more frequently from within. Recognize who the incompetent bozos are among management, and stop rewarding them more than your developers. Stop force-feeding the Kool-aid. Few are buying it - they're only playing along because they don't trust that you'd reward them for honesty.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – Benefits are top notch for the area.

Cons – Upper management has little interest in promoting qualified associates.

Advice to Senior Management – Become more transparent, let the people know what is really going on. Reward them for the good they do!

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com full-time for more than a year

Pros – working to create new digital experiences and new platforms is cool, get to work with some smart people, brand recognition of amazon is great, stock price is doing well.

Cons – HR/Performance management systems are stuck in the 90's and don't encourage growth or risk taking. Middle management is under trained and in experienced - folks getting promoted based on politics and connections not on skills. Lack of people investment, people are worked hard and get burnt out.

The digital org - kindle + others - has grown incredibly quickly leading to some of these cons. Not sure how these issues exist in retail, aws or other orgs but lots of people are leaving digital for those orgs.

Advice to Senior Management – Communicate vision better, talk more to ground level employees, clean up mgmt orgs - take care of your people

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company