-Too much process and bureaucracy sometimes make it difficult to get real work done.
-Increasingly aggressive schedules make a mockery of the entire point of hardware development checkpoints. Some engineers with less backbone will feel like they have no choice but to do subpar work or misrepresent results in order to stay on schedule.
-It’s been a bumpy ride for the past year. Lots of reorgs and product cancellations as Seattle course corrects from the fire phone failure and Lab126 figures out what it wants to be when it grows up. I expect most of the turbulence is now in the past.
-There is a definite disconnect with Seattle leadership. At the end of the day, this is a hardware subdivision being run by an internet retail company.
-Product Management org is (with some exceptions) completely clueless, and one gets the feeling that successes like the Echo come at random.
-There is some unnecessary disconnect between hardware and software orgs (for example, you will see many SDE’s here blaming hardware for the delay or failure of the phone. Not true. Delays happened due to failures of SW leadership. The failure of the phone itself happened due to hubris on the part of bezos and product management thinking think that customers would leave their comfortable Apple or Google ecosystems for an Amazon walled garden on the strength of a hardware differentiator gimmick at the same prices as their iPhones or Galaxy S6. Whatever happened to “premium products at non premium prices?” )
-To add to the previous point, there is some bitterness within the company, post reorg, that kindle was reorganized under the phone team. The reasoning was correct, the phone team delivered on every milestone we were assigned. The same could not be said for the Kindle hardware team. The way that the reorg was handled, however, was poor, which brings me to the next point.
-Communication is not a strong suit. Many good engineers have left out of frustration because they felt slighted or didn’t understand the pivots the company was making.
-You won’t be babied with perks like free meals or business class flights, but honestly if that’s really that important to you you’re probably too spoiled and immature to work here anyways.
-There is a very limited bus network and Seattle does not seem to have the understanding that private bus transport is vital for silicon valley companies to attract and retain talent. If you want to live in the mission in SF and board a bus at 7:30am every day, it might work for you though.
