Amazon Software Development Engineer reviews

- Employees are not treated as well as customers. - Horrible IC promotion process - getting promoted is a joke, especially for individual contributors at higher levels. Talent is just a minor factor. At most 20% is within your control, the rest is pretty much random luck: is your manager willing to do the hard work, is your manager experienced enough to get you promoted, is anyone else getting promoted on your team? does your organization promote engineers regularly? who do you know? who does your manager know? did you have more than one manager during the last review cycle? did you your team go through a re-org? was the project you worked on this review period "visible" enough? The company is shooting itself in the foot by not fixing this problem. - Pager duty. Depending on the team you're on, this can have a very negative impact on your work-life balance. Your overall comp should be at least 20% higher than elsewhere to make up for oncall rotations, crazy load, unrealistic expectations, and at times brutal and uncaring management. - "Frugal" is a euphemism for cheap. It's way overdone.

- Company is not at all sorry to screw people's work-life balance for itself to excel. - Worse is , the management thinks, its great to overwork people because they should be obsessed with their work just like scientists. Their tagline for employees is "Work hard, Have fun( by working hard) , Make history (by screwing your life)". - Takes pride in scaring people of throwing them away of job and in return make them work hard. - Wants innovation but that should come as an additional achievement. There is not much lee-way given the employee to do innovation like time,resource , encouragement etc... - Last but not the least , they will try to take advantage of a candidate who is less demanding in compensation when joining. Once the employee realizes that he is paid less then peers , the employee will have live with and will never be able to catch up.