Good Pay, but bad in every other sense - System Development Engineer II Amazon Employee Review

- In most cases, SysDev as a role does not involve any feature development or design work. - Work life balance can get pretty bad in some teams. - Peers are some of the most toxic people I've ever seen, trying to set up others to fail every chance they get. There is a complete sink or swim culture and most people don't want to help new joiners onboard to save themselves from getting in the bottom percentile which gets PIP'd. - Vertical movement/Promotions are very difficult as promotions require peer feedback which most people are not inclined to give due to stack ranking. Most cases people create over engineered solutions just to land a promotion as the levelling criteria is always misinterpreted. - SysDev as a role is one of the worst and poorly managed roles in the company. Most SysDevs are part of Support orgs working with Support Engineers for all the grunt work development teams don't want to do. While on paper it is considered a parallel role to SDE with 75% of SDE base salary, the actual work in most teams is either mundane infra migrations or company wide campaigns which involve minor config changes here and there. - Getting anything done in this company is a challenge. There is so much process and politics it will make you miserable. A lot of times removing a single line of code will take weeks as people don't simply respond to others here for reviews, especially when working as away teams which is the norm for most SysDevs. You will be treated as a second class citizen as a SysDev compared to SDEs who command much more respect in the company.