Amazon Principal Software Development Engineer reviews

* (this is not actually a Con in many ways but many people would say) that being on pager duty for your service as a Software Development Engineer is a con - after all, software engineers want to write code more than get paged at night for some operational issue - that being said, being on-call for your stuff is deeply ingrained into the Amazon engineering culture and goes hand in hand with "engineer ownership of products" - being on-call also gives you license as the on-call SDE to insist on a minimum engineering quality to protect your customers from operational problems -my point is, if you do not want to be on pager on-call for your service, definitely do not join Amazon as a software engineer * generally speaking, if you don't love being a software engineer and dread going to work and are in it just for the paycheck, you probably really don't want to join Amazon - the people that I see thrive and be enthusiastic at Amazon the most are people who love what they do and have fanatical ownership (I am that way, so that's why I love being at Amazon so much, but I realize not everyone is) - note that you don't have to work 80 hours a week either, I choose to work 45-50 hours a week - indeed, I was promoted to Principal SDE about two years after I decided to work a lot fewer hours a week

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