Amazon Employee Reviews

Salary - A | Culture - C | Management - C | Coworkers - C

Pros: The pay is (or can be anyway) good as a software engineer. The company is huge and has pretty good internal mobility. As long as you don't land on a low performing list, you can try all kinds of things on all kinds of teams. The location is right in downtown Seattle and is easily accessible on foot, bus, or bike. They also have great bike facilities in their new buildings with secure indoor storage, charging stations, and showers. There are plenty of opportunities to get experience with all the Amazon technologies like AWS, etc. at scale and addressing real and interesting problems. You also can get in on internal betas of new products (this isn't always exciting. A recent opportunity was beta testing more ads in your prime video.)
Cons: Which team you join makes a huge difference. Talking to a dev from the team and asking smart questions will go a long way to determining what kind of experience you have. Almost all teams have pager duty. Some teams have absolutely brutal pager duty with alerts all hours, weekends, and holidays. Some teams have absolutely terrible management culture compounded by being understaffed (because who wants to work there). If the whole team just quit or there are 10-20 people under one manager, go find something else. Nothing is ever really done (unless it's cancelled) or to high quality, for many engineering personalities this can lead to work consuming your whole life. Amazon invests as minimally as possible in infrastructure so a lot of things are poorly documented, broken, incompatible, etc. Relative to other companies they also invest pretty minimally in project management. A lot of your job is navigating the resulting chaos and many of the leadership principals are effectively about that.

Salary - D | Culture - C | Management - A | Coworkers - D

Pros: Constantly changing environment. Interesting coworkers. Atypical work environment.
Cons: Hours. Work/life balance. Strain on your body. Quotas for writing people up (3 per shift). You won’t know what shift or department you’ll be in until you accept the offer. The setup with leaders at Amazon is such that it is constantly changing - managers moving shifts and departments. This can be good or bad. Have a horrible team? Just wait a few months - someone will be gone. But on the flip side you could hit that sweet spot with team dynamics and then your dream team is disrupted. A normal full-time job is 2080 a year (40hr x 52 weeks), but I worked 2696 in one year (remember, no overtime, so when you calculate your actual hourly rate be sure to take the true picture into account). Sadly, that’s just counting the hours in the facility - plenty of times I worked at home on things like revising AA’s resumes to get them ready for promotions.

I absolutely loved going to LEW and learning about how to care and advocate for the AAs and to build trust with your team, only to get into an environment with an abusive OM who was the antithesis of everything preached during training. The number of hours I spent defending and standing up for my employees to a tyrant who would scream and curse at us is inexcusable. His behavior was known and condoned by senior leadership and that’s when I realized this would never be a place I could see myself staying at.

Salary - C | Culture - C | Management - C | Coworkers - C

Pros: Minimal interactions working at the warehouse because after a few days of training you’ll be working on own. Only time you need to talk is if one of the higher ups ask you to do a task. Outside of that I was paid $22.5/hr to basically work at my own pace of loading bags and boxes (up to 50lbs.) and staging them for drivers to pick up. After work you don’t have to think about it at all. Pay is weekly!
Cons: Labor will be hard on your body even with proper technique because you’ll be doing a minimum of 4hrs of it a day and up to 12hrs if you choose. Boring and repetitive job but easy to comprehend.

Greet associates more often and start the day by helping out on work if possible. Way too often do I see management just sitting around and having idle chat while all associates are picking and such.

Salary - B | Culture - B | Management - C | Coworkers - C

Pros: For the most part, their claim to be data-driven is the truth. The engineers they hire are pretty amazing, and good to work with. When mistakes happen, they blame processes instead of people, and keep iterating on those process to improve them. They follow agile development, more or less. Lower-level managers are supportive. The compensation is quite good, if you work in the states. When you tire of what you're working on, you can switch teams without much disruption.
Cons: Pager duty sucks and, depending on what team you're on, might cause you to lose sleep. It's tough to get promoted, and without a promotion, raises don't always keep up with inflation. The planning process, which determines how much head-count a team will get and what they'll be working on for the next year, feels like shouting into a hurricane, but with documents. While the data-driven thing applies to most people at the company, the CEO and "S-team" (C-suite) seem comfortable backing up their decisions with mushy opinion statements. When a lot of employees voice their opinion that a policy makes them unhappy, upper management responds with a shrug, and lower management is sympathetic but powerless. Like most (all?) corporations, they don't care about you.

Pay more attention to what the folks lower on the org chart are saying. Hold the upper management to the same standards as everyone else; after all, they get paid enough. To the board: Consider breaking up the company, it's too big. If you wait too long, the government might do it for you (depending on who runs the next administration).

Salary - B | Culture - C | Management - B | Coworkers - B

Pros: Alot of downtime during the normal season. Good benefits. Decent pay. Great time off choices. Decent vehicles. Opportunities to learn.
Cons: Hiring every and anyone can definitely have it's downsides. Laziness that doesn't get addressed. Lack of accountability. Lack of leadership. No incentive to doing more than the bare minimum. Alot of coworkers who use the system and get away with way too much. Almost a bad thing to become a good TA.

Teach. Keep associates accountable. Limit time off task and push for low performing employees to be moved off the team. Communicate within the building. Learn as much as you can from other departments.

Salary - A | Culture - D | Management - A | Coworkers - C

Pros: Plenty of opportunity to transfer/ take international assignment. AMZN Stock. Sr PM can make $250K USD plus a year with RSUs (if share price is up). Diverse teams, global projects. Some cool technology. 5 day a week in office, No more- WFH, taking a call in your PJs with a warm cup of cocoa
Cons: Day 1 = No process/ make it up as you go. Homey hook up in full effect to get job done Hero mode in overdrive. Most days firefighting Very hierarchial and rigid command and control RSU yes but terrible vesting schedule - "golden handcuffs" Zero worklife balance. Corp politics in overdrive - 10 meetings to review a report for Dir/ VP. Reporting hell. Too many layers for approvals. In continual manage up mode. Ageism. avergage age is 25 - 35 except for the boomer S-Team. No place for oldies Zero room for innovation or thinking out of the box. Get into your swimlane and follow my orders. What do expect for a 1.5M employee company with 8000 faciliites/ offices.

Nothing. Amazon is a global Cloud, AI and e-commerce force. Will always have people lined up to work. Shareholder is #1 - get that share price to $600!!!

Salary - A | Culture - A | Management - A | Coworkers - A

Pros: You'll get to work with the most recent tech stack. Amazing office if you want to go in occassionally. Great minds to learn from.
Cons: Big company means your people skills go way further than your development skills. I was kind of screwed over my first manager failed to authenticate my computer before I could start. This put me on the fryer for all sorts of problems, Management did everything to make things right for me including shifting my status to rehire after my contract was complete and giving me a really solid reference.

Its important to know that sometimes in big companies like this even though a good employees might be doing a good job they can be made look unproductive by roadblocks caused by stuff like authorization not being handled by management. I give the career oppurtunities a 5 because I love being able to say I work on the Amazon music app in interviews

Salary - B | Culture - C | Management - A | Coworkers - B

Pros: One of the highest paid, entry-level jobs in the area. Very flexible point-based UPT (Un-Paid Time) system for taking days off, as well as PTO (Paid Time-Off) and Vacation hours. Easy to learn No interview, just a one-time drug test. Lots of benefit options and insurances Yearly company-wide pay increases
Cons: Physically demanding work, lifting and moving up to 50lbs for 10 hours a day. Night-shift. Limited opportunities for advancement, unless you're willing to up-skill by returning to college with assistance from Amazon's Career-Choice program. MET (Mandatory Extra Time) is pretty common during busy times of the year, and you will be expected to work the extra days for up to several weeks at a time, with as few as 1 day off in between work-weeks.

Currently, lunch-breaks are only 30 minutes long (unpaid), and I'd personally love to see that adjusted to 1 hour to allow for a more relaxed experience like those at some of my previous employers. This would be enough to enjoy a meal at a slower pace, or take a power-nap if needed by those newer employees.

Salary - B | Culture - F | Management - F | Coworkers - D

Pros: The benefits are great and the weekly pay is good.
Cons: The managers have control issues and constantly over micromanage to the point where you just have to leave and find another company that values to work you do and actually has advancement opportunities. There's a lot of favoritism going on and no matter how hard you work you will still continue to get pass over for opportunities that the other employees are getting for less There's no seniority with Amazon you can be here for 6 months to a year doing the same task over and over and somebody who just got hired unless than a month will get the opportunities that you worked for.

The robot method doesn't apply to humans stop over micromanaging employees, its causing a toxic work environment

Salary - C | Culture - F | Management - F | Coworkers - D

Pros: can't think of any pros in the company, if I can think of one thing may be salary of benefits, but it usually for the namesake and management will try to remove higher paid employees before huge vesting unless you are related to manager by background or willing to give good feedback to manager even if they are counterproductive to the company. I observed this more often with some managers who came from CapitalOne across Amazon.
Cons: Bad management, leadership principles are used against employees who try to do the right thing for company or career. Promotions are only given to employees whom management thinks will provide good review for their further promotion or related. You may not learn much here in terms of career development, technologies and tools are internal to Amazon, wont help a lot outside the company, other than AWS cloud. Management raises budget concerns during comp review, I have heard the same in many other teams in AWS, people are getting laid off or either will be removed by Pivot/PIP for any reason, whenever they reach higher vesting period unless their salaries are low.

Remove L7 managers who only care about promotions and got their promotion recently, who only worry about keeping their job instead of doing productive actions for the company, who are biased. Remove L6 managers who are learning the same from L7's for promotion. It used to be a great company years ago, I think it can still reach again if identified before it's too late. Recognize younger talent more at higher management, who can inform stakeholders about the truth and also bring diverse ideas to the table that can actually be productive.