Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(209,765 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

50% approve of CEO

57% positive business outlook

Amazon has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 209,765 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Amazon employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

210K reviews
3.0
Sep 19, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Other companies love to hire people with Amazon experience as they know they are overworked but smart and know what they are doing. You'll never work with smarter people. Corporate is dog-friendly.

Cons

Zero Work/Life balance. Instead of hiring 1 person to do the job of 1 person, they hire 1 person to do the job of 3 people. It helps eliminates a potential for layoffs, but doing 3 full-time jobs is absurd. Internal promotions require tons of red tape.

3.0
May 17, 2013

almost two years

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

innovative culture, chill environment, chill dress code, company subsidized café with organic food, respectful co workers

Cons

unless you negotiate well going in, don't expect a further opportunity at end of year review unless you are an executive not all managers provide a challenging environment salary is low so stock is vital benefits are great Orca card shuttles between buildings and to train station great tools to do your work re IT people are predominantly nice

2.0
Jan 29, 2013
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nothing special, really. An advantage is that you can push hard for something, and if you're willing to put in the time, you will be able to get it done. If you've got the energy, drive, and chutzpah, you can do well here, but this is a production environment, don't expect cutting edge. Pay is good.

Cons

Amazon is basically a big store with a huge web presence. Don't expect anything really exciting to happen here. Although, occasionally, something may pop out. When you work here, consider yourself a cog. The catch-phrase is something like "a good software developer can do anything." What this means, in practice, is that everyone seems to be working on stuff they are not particularly good at. If there is a need to deal with a web scalability problem, there may be someone two desks down who may be an expert on server scalability, but is instead working on UI. No effort seems to be made to fit people with their strengths. Amazon's emphasis on frugality makes it so the work environment is not particularly pleasant. Be prepared to work in a "start up" work environment with power cords hanging from the ceiling, cheap desks, no partitions, etc. A real issue with the frugality mindset is that Amazon tries to develop on a shoestring. The build procedures are poorly planned, and tools are pretty primitive. Most infrastructure groups are woefully understaffed and it shows. Because the infrastructure is so poor, developers can expect to spend more time dealing with infrastructure issues (such as build issues) than in other companies. So much time is wasted dealing with issues like this, that you can expect to work overtime just to get a normal amount of work done. Lastly, benefits are not great.

Viewing 376 - 378 of 209,765 Reviews

Glassdoor has 251,279 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.