Amazon reviews

3.5

60% would recommend to a friend

(210,064 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 210,064 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
Aug 5, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Pay is some of the best in the industry for a new grad, up there with Google and MS. Benefits are decent. Most teams work normal 40-hour weeks, unless you get unlucky enough to get put on a team with an insane workload or on-call rotation.

Cons

The culture hates developers and treats them like second-class citizens. Due to Jeff Bezos's obsession with miserliness (which he mistakenly calls "frugality") you will be given one standard monitor, one slow desktop, and one slow laptop with not enough RAM. If you want anything else, take it from an intern's desk after he/she leaves, or buy it yourself. In the same vein, funding to fix "developer pain" issues is non-existent. Could everyone's job satisfaction or productivity be vastly improved by having a few developers work on environment, tooling, or build system issues? Doesn't matter! You can either voluntarily spend your free time working on it, or do without. Actually lots of business-critical internal tooling is maintained this way, by "volunteers". Be prepared for tools you use every day to fall over when whatever random guy maintains them leaves the company! Management doesn't care. All hail "frugality"! Your manager will probably technically be a former engineer. But teams are informally run by business people here, not engineers. They love to strong-arm engineering managers into committing to dates for project launches without spending an appropriate amount of time investigating and scoping out the work. Oh, and the main reason projects take so long is because given a choice between spending two months on doing something correctly, and one month on some horrible hack that makes it kinda work but convolutes your entire architecture, guess what the non-technical people who run your org will pick EVERY time... It's gotten to the point that we have business code no one understands or is willing to touch, simply by "death by a thousand cuts" with no time ever allocated for refactoring. Don't even get me started on the space... I hope for your sake that you get put in one of the new buildings that are "only" normal high-density seating, not Amazon high-density seating. Otherwise, your work environment will sound like a high school cafeteria and be about as productive.

2.0
Jul 21, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

They offer work from home, they pay nicely, they offer great benefits, room for advancement.

Cons

Nothing stays the same, change is the only constant with Amazon within 3 months I went through 3 managers. They don't care about their employees and view everyone as being replaceable, it does not matter how long you have been with the company, new associates are thrown into the same bowl with you and can take promotions and shifts from the associates who have been there longer just based on weekly stats. They expect a lot from their employees, you may be trained in 4 different skills and may be expected to take contacts in all of those skills while learning new skills in a very short period of time. Management doesn't have much power to help employees and HR doesn't help them either, you are basically on your own!

1.0
May 23, 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Decent pay and benefits. The 4 day work week and occasional overtime was nice. They dangle stock in front of you, but no-one stays long enough to get it. Break rooms decent.

Cons

Utterly ridiculous production standards. Don't get injured on the job or ill from their non air conditioned sweat shop DC's. If you do, your promptly shown the door. Amazon does practice age discrimination. EVERYONE fired from my group at the San Bernardino DC was all over the age of 50. Just another sweat shop with an over hyped name. Amazon does not value loyalty or long term employees, especially older workers.

Viewing 625 - 627 of 210,064 Reviews

Glassdoor has 251,663 Amazon reviews submitted anonymously by Amazon employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Amazon is right for you.