Amazon.com Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – You will learn what it really means to be customer centric.
Company is much less bureaucratic than other large tech companies.
If you are smart, motivated, single and have no other commitments you can succeed.
You will learn a lot and ship a lot. It is true that 1 year experience at Amazon is equivalent to 2 years at any other large tech company.

Cons – Company is customer focused, not employee focused. Management does not care about you as a person. If you have kids and your wife is working, then Amazon is not for you.
A lot of churn in many groups. Plans, designs and everything else changes all the time. You have to be good at handling such churn.
A lot is expected from you. You need to be able to handle a lot of stress, be great at multitasking, and should be available round the clock (e.g early morning meetings with Europe and late night meetings with teams in India).

Advice to Senior Management – Middle management is trying to achieve ambitious goals through brute force instead of coming up with creative solutions.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Amazon.com

Pros – The pay is good, you work 10 hour days and only work 4 hours. i worked the night time shift which still wasnt that bad.

Cons – It gets really hot in the summer time. Depending on your job it can get repetitive and some jobs require more exercise then others.

Advice to Senior Management – Place more water throughout the warehouse.

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

Pros – a lot to learn, ownership, less heirarchy

Cons – too much work, no fun

Advice to Senior Management – management is good

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

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

Pros – Compensation is great. They have nice bonus incentives for new hires.

Cons – Long hours. No care for your well being and very little interest in developing people. Training is very poor and they treat the bottom level associates like cattle.

Advice to Senior Management – Wait 90 days to pay out any bonus money to allow people to make sure it will be a good fit.

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 – Good pay and time off once hired.

Cons – never good enough to some managers esp. if they already don't like you

Advice to Senior Management – Bring better attitudes and respect to the table and you will def. get the same in return

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – innovative culture, chill environment, chill dress code, company subsidized café with organic food, respectful co workers

Cons – unless you negotiate well going in, don't expect a further opportunity at end of year review unless you are an executive
not all managers provide a challenging environment
salary is low so stock is vital
benefits are great
Orca card
shuttles between buildings and to train station
great tools to do your work re IT
people are predominantly nice

Advice to Senior Management – instead of signing bonus split over two years for the under $100K employees, make it one lump sum for one year

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – - You will be able to learn a lot here. There are many interesting problems to be solved and you can be owner of the project pretty quickly.
- Seattle. While it gets really cloudy from September to April, it has really nice summer weather. Also, it does not snow much.
- Flexible hours. You can come to office pretty late and leave late if you have to.
- 401k, medical insurance.
- Free coffee, tea, and hot cocoa. You can have as many as you want.
- You can bring your dog to the office. You will be able to meet a lot of dogs here.
- Decent base salary with stocks. Amazon gives you decent amount of salary.

Cons – - On-call rotation. You will have to carry a pager and be in an alert 24 hours because one of software that you manage can go down, and system needs a way to tell you about it. It is not fun for anyone to wake up 3am or 6am in the morning once in a week to solve the problem. This brings a lot of time to be spent on operation rather than developing your skill sets.
- Bad work/life balance. Tight dead lines. On Thursday, some problem gets escalated and you need to solve it by next Monday, before your manager's meeting, which means you have to spend your weekend. This happens very frequently depending on your team.
- Not so much room for salary increase. Amount of increase of your salary will probably the lowest in the industry unless you get promoted. If you are exceptional but did not get promoted, you will likely get about inflation rate (or lower) increase in salary. You will soon be able to find out that people who joined a year or two later than you getting higher salary with less skills.
- Frugality. You don't get free food or perks. You will have to work everything on your single monitor and they will not accept your request to have multiple monitors.
- This is just a minor thing but 780 square feet office with 11 developers and 2 managers isn't a good place to focus on your work. You will be able to hear a dog barking every other 10 minutes in the office next to you.

Advice to Senior Management – Amazon is infamous for high turn over rate, and obviously, there is reason for that. The management needs to realize the cost of developers leaving the company, and treat employees well to prevent it. Otherwise, developers will leave and future developers will need to catch up and clean past works, while keeping tight deadline for new projects.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

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

Pros – It has good promotion opportunity

Cons – You got huge pressure while working.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Amazon.com

Pros – Smart peers, fun environment, doggies! Developers and product managers are key to the success of each team.

Cons – Middle management needs work. Not great at developing direct reports or helping them get to the next level of their career. This is my only experience on one team at Amazon. I'm hoping this is an isolated situation.

Advice to Senior Management – Need to learn to lead by example and help develop the talent they have.

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

Pros – + Good outside visibility, everyone thinks People at Amazon are doing wonderful things.
+ Seattle is not bad as a city when compared to other US cities which have retail companies
+ Easy to shoot for average and seem busy
+ Sleep in your own bed every night, not easy in consulting

Cons – + Middle management has no idea on what to do, are riding coattails and don't know math
+ Too much stress for too little pay, Amazon upfront numbers seems high but no salary growth
+ Feedback is not helpful, everything is directed towards you.
+ Company culture is toxic and everyone is scheming or playing games to climb up
+ Leadership principles are used to basically slave drive employees, totally useless
+ No concept of feedback, ideas to improve culture. Everything is an order.
+ RLD program is a scam, you will be stuck in a position you don't want to be in with handcuffs. You can't move.
+ RLD program leadership are not helpful at all, they simply make false promises upfront.

Advice to Senior Management – My advice is to only super senior management (VPs and above). Please sit with you manager during their review discussion with their reports, do anonymous surveys to know where people stand. If you still can't find the answer, then may god help all those are long on this ticker.

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