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Amazon Web Services

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Good for resume, bad for health - Devops Amazon Web Services Employee Review

2.0
11 Apr 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good compensation, average perks; Good for resume; Amazing interview process

Cons

One of the tasks in their training process is to leave a review in Glassdoor, when you don't even have 90 days in the company, that should speak for itself, but let's go: - there are talks about work-life balance, but it's culturally accepted that you will work more than 40h a week, employees and managers talk about it as it's "normal and so cool"; - the company is divided in upper management (S-team) and the rest, and those two can't communicate, no feedback goes up there, decisions are taken without input and can't be questioned (search for "beth galetti petition rejection" for a good example), even managers 4 levels and above are left in the dark sometimes; - cultural values (leadership principles) are heavily pushed, but are not put in practice by managers. You will only receive good feedback about it if you practice them the way they see fit at the moment, not by the book; - communications are unclear and sometimes unnecessary, why communicate a massive layoff and not be crystal clear on who is going to be affected, my entire team's moral took a hit even it being obvious we weren't going to be affected

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
11 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great team working on interesting work

Cons

Promotions can vary a lot team to team

4.0
12 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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