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Amazon Web Services

Part of Amazon

Is this your company?

The corporate equivalent of the Stanford Prison Experiment - Business Development Amazon Web Services Employee Review

1.0
16 Apr 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Learn what’s happening in cloud tech

Cons

Anyone who has stayed at Amazon longer than their first four years, eg your next manager, is likely on the sociopathic spectrum. You have to be soulless to survive and thrive here, because the company is soulless. Amazon is full of performative corporate drones that have learned to game the system and will use an array of tools to make themselves look good while diminishing your and other subordinate employees contributions. The leadership, particularly Jassy and Garman, are visionless and uninspiring. They don’t have any good growth ideas to combat competitors so they are using their monopsony power to squeeze margin out of the employee base to goose up the stock price. This adversarial approach to management has turned the South Lake Union campus into something of a gilded prison. The gleaming buildings hide an upside down world in which the least competent but most ruthless people run the show. Your work and contributions are consumed by these ruthless people to further their careers. You get to keep your paycheck, but not your dignity, as long as you’re willing to play the game.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
5 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good Compensation Chance to work on large scale projects

Cons

Promotions are slow Bar is not high across the company

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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