How is the engineering culture at Amazon? Do you get tasks and hard deadlines from PMs? Or is it more inclusive and you work together towards product goals? In other words, are you micro-managed? I understand that every company has some micro managers and some others who make you feel involved and more motivated towards greater purpose, but I’m trying to understand the general culture at Amazon.
Varies a lot by org and team. A good indicator is if it’s a sexy project/tech that people want to be on, then management and the people tend to be jerks (if not your team, then sister teams).
What orgs tend to have the most “sexy” projects? I’m assuming AWS/Alexa/experimental teams like Amazon Go?
Makes sense. Thank you both!
Engineers drive their own deliveries. PMs set large scale initiatives (re:Invent projects for example). They'll hold you to your time estimates
I like it and dislike it. Any roadblocks you hit will get solved/addressed eventually. For eg I hated 1 of our internal tools that I was forced to use...but in 2 months some team came out with a solid solution to the issues faced by the older tool. These things happen frequently I've seen which is amazing. The only thing I hate is Brazil...it sucks.
It's collaborative. PMs and Engineering meet on a regular basis and talk about what they think is most important for the current year and upcoming year. PMs tend to focus on the big picture projects and marketing efforts, and SDMs break work down into smaller projects/tasks for their teams.
In my experience. It's a pretty collaborative process. Although bad orgs tend to have company mandated deadlines for some projects because of middle manager failing to plan effectively. Personally, I've felt micromanaged in my last team. Not in my current team. The culture, as you would expect in a company of this size, varies from org to org.