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      IMDb

      Part of Amazon

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      IMDb reviews

      4.3

      94% would recommend to a friend

      (36 total reviews)
      avatar

      Col Needham

      93% approve of CEO

      89% positive business outlook

      Ratings by demographic groups

      IMDb has an employee rating of 4.3 out of 5 stars, based on 36 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have an excellent working experience there. The IMDb 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

      36 reviews
      5.0
      Jan 15, 2018

      A great place for solving interesting problems at Amazon scale...but for movies!

      Anonymous employee
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      - You'll work alongside some of the best talent in engineering, product, and operations. - It's a great learning culture; most folks are happy to teach you something new. - You'll create, support and improve features used and loved by millions of customers -- including celebrities and movie industry pros. - You'll get to leverage cool Amazon tech and occasionally collaborate with other Amazon teams like Prime Video, Amazon Studios and others. - Dogs.

      Cons

      - We run at breakneck speed; fully-fledged design and tech specs are a luxury. Ownership means being ready to ask questions and fill the gaps. - Product and prioritization changes can come fast; you have to roll with it (or speak up).

      5.0
      Sep 20, 2017

      Strong feeling of ownership and great life balance

      Senior software engineer
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      The main reason I have worked here now for so many years is the sense of autonomy, influence, and feeling of ownership over the product. I work directly with project managers and designers to collaborate on solutions rather than being handed specifications to implement blindly. Reading and replying to customer feedback keeps me connected to ways of improving the product and coming up with tasks myself to fix problems. It's a lot like working at a startup in that I have a wide scope of responsibilities and influence, while still being in the safety of an Amazon subsidiary company. IMDb also has its own culture that is separate from the parent company in a good way. I'm rarely required to work nights or weekends, though I sometimes do just because I'm really excited about something I'm working on. Unlike many parts of Amazon, we have an operations team that handles the first line of on-call. We usually only get paged when it's not something that the operation team can mitigate quickly.

      Cons

      While we have a lot of cool ideas for new features, it can be frustrating to see them get deprioritized and forgotten about. The work we end up doing tends to focus on direct ways to get short term gains rather than investing in the product to grow our user base over time. Often, we can only get things done if we don't need to ask for help from other teams. Being one of the first internet companies, we have also had a lot of technical debt that has prevented us from accomplishing bold new ideas. We're very close to eliminating the biggest piece of that debt and I'm hopeful that things will begin to change. Previously I've felt that upper management has tended to attract some people who wanted to use IMDb as a stepping stone to bigger and better things elsewhere. Though, in the past one or two years this has changed. I'm now impressed with our current leadership and tentatively hopeful at the direction of the company. You probably won't get to work on a really cool secret project like you might find at Amazon. Most work here is routine and incremental. Only people who are excited about the company and successful in finding ways to get things done tend to enjoy working here.

      5.0
      Sep 20, 2017

      A great tech company for movie & TV lovers

      Anonymous employee
      Recommend
      CEO approval
      Business Outlook

      Pros

      About me: I've worked full-time at IMDb for four years. I'm in the company's Los Angeles-area office. While you don't *have to* love movies and TV to work here, it helps. Who works here? The kinds of people who sit through the credits of a movie, who binge-watch STRANGER THINGS, and who care about the box office gross of WONDER WOMAN. Our CEO likes to say that there's no such thing as a bad movie -- only a movie that's not right for you. Meaning, we embrace the fat head and the long tail of movies and TV and love that people love what they love (SHARKNADO fan? IMDb loves you. Christopher Nolan snob? IMDb loves you. Honest Trailers fan? IMDb loves you.) The business of our site and app goes beyond the "Db", so there's a lot of diversity in the work. But the core of our company is that "Db", and much of our resources and attention are to that. Amazon acquired IMDb in 1998. We are a full-stack company and act fairly independently but we collaborate and take guidance from our parent owner. This is mostly an advantage but can be a constraint as well. The biggest advantage is that we're "Amazonian": Leadership Principles, Working Backwards, Customer Obsession, long-term vs. short-term, mechanisms vs. good intentions. If those buzzwords don't mean anything to you, look 'em up on Amazon or google them. These are the best parts of Amazon and they infuse IMDb. I think it's always easier to work for something that you believe in and/or love. If you love movies and TV and the people who create movies and TV -- and the people who love movies and TV! -- then as tech companies go, IMDb is a great place to work. If you believe in the "Amazonian" way of operating a business, then IMDb is a great place to work.

      Cons

      I said that being owned by Amazon has its advantages, but it also has its disadvantages. One of the main ones is that decisions can't always be made independently. Occasionally we are pulled or pushed in a questionable direction because of our corporate parent. The other big negative is that we have a lot of legacy code. This is being refactored (on a massive, years-long scale) but it means that resources are expended on fixing the past vs. resources being devoted to building the future. Most very old and very large Internet companies face this challenge but that doesn't make it any less painful. I think for our software engineers, it's actually demoralizing (fixing vs. building).

      Viewing 4 - 6 of 36 Reviews
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      Glassdoor has 46 IMDb reviews submitted anonymously by IMDb employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if IMDb is right for you.