Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

3.5

54% would recommend to a friend

(3,330 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

37% approve of CEO

52% positive business outlook

Software Development Engineer employees have rated Amazon with 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 3,330 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Development Engineer professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Development Engineer professionals compared to other employers within the Informatique industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

3K reviews
4.0
Jul 26, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very good pay compared to the industry. Developers are responsible from design to QA, deployment and maintenance of software. This allows great efficiency and ensures little overhead of dealing with multiple groups on one project. Developers are very good at what they do, and are helpful in general. There are internal tech talks and learning sessions almost every week to keep other developers abreast of what's happening at different units. Most managers came from a technical background; therefore they understand and communicate with developers well. There is little office politics I can see of. Internal transfers are encouraged. This is great because there are always exciting new projects going on within the company.

Cons

Pager duty. Depending on the size of the team, it's usually one week out of six-eight. The rather high turnover rate can be annoying when you need to understand the code written before any current devs joined. The benefits are on the slim side, however the generous stock options somewhat compensate for that.

3.0
Jul 22, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Very bright people. I have never been bored. You can see the results of your work quickly. Innovation is encouraged. Developers have the opportunity to use new technologies. The private book signings with authors that are offered to employees are great.

Cons

There is too much work for too few people. On-call is onerous. Whether you have a good job is determined by whether you are lucky enough to have a good boss. The management is young, and can lack experience. The operational burden that falls on software development engineers can be very distracting. While there is work on improving tools, the spin up for using proprietary tools can be difficult.

4.0
Jul 13, 2008
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

As a young Software Engineer, there aren't many places that will pay you like Amazon. The pay is very, very good. Figured I would get that out there up front. I have a good deal of freedom with my job, and with small exceptions, I haven't been overburdened with long hours, either. From talking with other employees from other teams, and reading these reviews, I think it is somewhat the luck of the draw with Amazon - because teams are very independant and decentralized, your experience with one team can be wildly different from another. Luckily, I believe I am on a very good one. Management has been great, in my experience. My manager is a coder/manager, so while he isn't the best project manager I've ever worked with, he works very hard to understand what is going on at a low level with the team, without micromanaging. I rarely have had to deal with upper management, and when I do, the experience has been positive. Work/life balance has also been good. My team is very understanding and somewhat liberal when it comes to giving time off when necessary. The schedule is also very flexible, we can come and go as we please, work from home when necessary, etc. Amazon's recruiting process brings in the best and brightest. I have yet to meet an SDE at Amazon tha I thought "slipped through the cracks" and didn't belong. Everyone at the company seems capable of contributing at a high level.

Cons

As most SDE's at Amazon will point to - pager duty. I fully support the concept of ownership and supporting the software you write. The downside to oncall duty at Amazon is that much of the software is legacy code that was written long before you (or anyone on your team) was there, so debugging it can be a hassle. Also, some smaller teams share pager duty, and while this means you are oncall less often, it also means that you can end up supporting code you know nothing about. Amazon's mantra of frugality slips a bit too far into the benefits. While the pay is very good, the benefits are not. There is no tuition reimbursement, 401k is sub par, and the health care is not cheap. While overall the decentralized nature of the company is a positive, it can be difficult to work with other teams. If you need something done on their end, but it is low on their priorities....tough. This can be frustrating as deadlines come very fast.

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