What is it like to work as a software engineer at Amazon?

[infinite_loop]

I have been approached by Amazon's technical recruiting department. The recruiter's pitch mentioned AWS, Computer Vision and Machine Learning projects.

I am an experienced software engineer and I love my job. My current employer takes care of us when our family needs us, and our managers are ex-engineers.

If you are a current, or recent employee of Amazon, do you think I would I enjoy working for them?

[Isofarro]

As far as I can tell, working in the AWS teams is perhaps the best software engineering place to be at Amazon (e.g. note Tim Bray's joining the Vancouver office.). The positivity from there I've seen echoed by other diverse sources, so unlikely to be just kool aid.

Everywhere else, stay away, unless it is something you have a very very strong passion for. (Perhaps the Games teams might be another AWS like atmosphere in the making, hard to say yet). Don't get bait-and-switched with AWS buzzwords, make sure it is AWS doing the hiring.

From my experience working for Amazon, they seem to grind engineers down, so they are regularly churning through a constant supply of graduates to keep employee numbers up. So a large chunk of engineering is new to 2 years.

Stack Ranking (the cross-over of staff between Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle means the same people drawing up employee performance processes. They may insist it isn't stack ranking, but looking at how the review process works is inescapable that the nastiness of stack ranking is present)

Edit: there are a handful of genuinely good engineering teams at Amazon, but their ability to make a positive impact is tainted by the volume of garbage that surrounds them.

[nefarioustim]

Seconded.

Having been a Senior Engineering Manager in an Amazon business, I can confirm that the stack ranking process is the single worse treatment of employees I have ever experienced. Furthermore, it is not based on an honest and truthful assessment of individuals, but rather who is best at standing up in a room full of managers across one division and arguing that their developers are better than someone else's, even if they've never met or seen the output of the developers they are arguing against. In fact, I've even seen people judged on the _amount_ of commits they've made (not the quality) and the _amount_ of wiki edits they have published.

It was the single worst employment period of my life, resulting in depression and stress that was off any scale you'd care to mention. I cannot recommend enough that you avoid at all costs.

[ksherlock]

I only know what Ted[0] told me: "This is a cheap place. Wait, did I say cheap? I mean frugal. No Herman-Miller Aeron chairs here. It's nice to work for a company that saves pennies so they add up on the bottom line. The office furniture is utilitarian. I'm sure there is a fancy executive table somewhere, but the conference rooms, training rooms, etc. just have plain tables."

I don't know if workplace conditions have improved in the past 10 years but I hope their recruiting has.

0: http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/The-Insider-Amazon...

[throwaway_o]

Amazon has a lousy reputation locally. It's well-deserved.

Think about this - you will be expected to switch teams every 12-18 months. You won't love that like you love your job now.

Don't take the money. It's not much anyway, really.

[throwaway_o]

To be more particular though, you most certainly will not like the strict hierarchy (see this comic[1]). And you will not like the non-technical managers who (see comic) have a lot of control and complete political power.

[1]

http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/

[istvan__]

Ex-Amazonian here, few things to consider. The following things are highly dependent on the team you are ending up working for though.

a, Amazon is frugal

Meaning that your workplace is looking like a grayscale picture of the surface of Mars. Chairs are pretty cheap, desks are wooden doors (just a gently reminder that our beloved CEO was poor once and he could not afford to have a nice office).

Amazon encourages employees to use their own equipment by not giving out nice work devices. When I started to work, I got a used laptop that was falling apart it had 2G of ram and slow hard drive. After few years it was upgraded to a non-SSD laptop with 4G of RAM. There was an internal thread about this, people were raging (rightfully though).

Amazon does not give you a credit card, regardless if you need to travel abroad. You also have a very tight budget that you can spend every year.

The salaries are laughable compare to other companies, their approach is that people are going to stay because they like the company not because their work is appreciated.

b, Amazon is a high risk low reward company

As a software engineer you are responsible for your code at the extent that if you are causing an outage (even a very small one) you might be excluded from promotions for a year and you have to explain it to a set of people how things went sideways and how you are going to prevent this situation in the future.

If you are doing good and all of your changes are great, you might even keep your job. Well, no promotions though, for that you need to befriend a set of people who are going to choose who gets promoted. Promotions don't really have anything to do with your performance, those mostly based on how good your manager is selling you to other managers.

I usually recommend Amazon as a CV value booster company, for senior engineers it does not have too much value, you can just work for Google or Microsoft (please do not troll me with anti-MS agenda) with similar recognition but way better salaries and work environment.

[istvan__]

I forgot to mention that post from Steve Yegge that is one of the best and most entertaining (but still very insightful at the same time) reviews of Amazon.

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

[duncan_bayne]

This may be of interest: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

[mattmurdog]

Unless we're talking life changing money, stay far far away.

[mter]

What are you looking to gain from the switch?

If you love your job, unless it comes with a substantial bump in pay, I wouldn't switch.

[rifung]

As much as I'd like to give you good advice, it's difficult because you don't give much background about where you are working right now and what you like about it. That being the case, I'll just give you advice I wish I had for myself, and if you have any other questions feel free to ask.

First of all, the company is huge, but the teams are relatively small. What this means is that your experience may vary greatly between teams. I'll start off with things that are consistent across Amazon (Seattle).

As far as benefits and things like that go, Amazon is the cheapest company I've ever seen. Their pay is pretty much the same as what you'd get in Silicon Valley, but the rent is cheaper. However, as far as I can tell their health plan is just mediocre and you don't really get any benefits beyond that. There aren't even really snacks, unless you count cheap coffee. If you want them though you can buy them from vending machines. This cheapness extends beyond benefits; I have had to use my own phone and cables for device testing.

The company does very very little to boost its image to its employees. The buildings are really boring, and you don't even get any Amazon "gear". They'll give you a backpack, but it's just a normal one. You'll probably hear about Amazon releases the same time as everyone else outside of Amazon unless you are working on the team doing the release.

The company relies heavily on internal tools. The tools aren't necessarily bad, but it's a huge pain to have to learn them when they aren't going to be helpful anywhere else.

The company is really slow to adopt technology. Pretty much every team will use Java and use the said internal tools. The company is really practical and safe in this way. They prefer to just use what people know. Also the company really values experience and credentials. Seeing as the company just uses Java and internal tools, it's difficult to learn new technologies on the job which will be applicable elsewhere.

All in all it feels like the company cares extremely little about its employees. For example, you get Christmas day off. Period. Not Christmas Eve. Same for Thanksgiving: you just get Thursday off.

Now there's the stuff that might change between teams, so this is all based off my personal experience.

Coming from start ups, people aren't that excited about their work. On the other hand, it's relaxed so it's nice for people with kids I think.

There isn't much sense of teamwork or energy. I don't think I've ever seen people proud to be part of their team.

I've asked many people about why they decided to work here, and aside from the very occasional "the work is interesting", pretty much everyone just works here because it's Amazon.

The work is actually really boring. As I said, the company is really safe so unless you are super senior and have some incredible credentials or have been with the company for a very long time, it's unlikely you'll get to do anything ground breaking.

The quality of the engineers varies pretty greatly. There are a few really awesome engineers and a bunch of mediocre ones.

I'm not even really sure the people here like programming. I don't even think I like programming that much but I'm the only person I know who does any form of side projects.

tl;dr I really see no reason to come here when you have a job you like. Amazon is like something out of a nightmare; a place where people go to forget their dreams or aspirations and have their livelihood sucked out of them.