I saw a lot of persons compare Amazon offer with other company. But as SDE working in Amazon AWS for two years, I would like to give a warning to person never work in Amazon, never choose to work in this company even if you have no choice.
Everyone know that Amazon hire bar is really low, lower than Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Someone even do not need interview can get Amazon offer. Actually, the reason is that the team hire you to put you in PIP quota. Trust me this is real, when I am the interviewer of Amazon, my manager told me that just let someone pass interview, and put them in PIP after one year, since no one in our team want to be put in PIP.
Another thing is that never think you could learn some cool tech in Amazon since 95% of SDE in Amazon just do boring operation work everyday. Also Amazon’s deployment pipeline is really poor, all the operation is manual, and it is usual case that someone broke pipeline will block other guys deployment.
Also do not think Amazon brand is good, actually when go to Google, Microsoft and Facebook from Amazon . They will give less salary and slow promotion speed since they known Amazon do not have bonus and hard to promote to high level.
I still remember one Chinese SDE suicide when he just participate Amazon for three months. A lot of my friends also face same issue as him.
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Secondly, as someone who interned at Amazon I can tell you that, while OP is probably disgruntled employee, it's a shit place to work for. In the span of 3 months, I saw 2 people get fired. Amazon Alexa btw.
Favoritism and politics are rampant, much more than in any other FAANG company and like the OP said, a significant chunk of engineering work is spent on on call and operational issues (without additional comp btw). In fact Amazon is the only company I saw that had MANDATORY 24/7 on-call.
One of the reasons why managers get away with favoritism is because they have these "leadership principles" that can be easily abused to promote / fire whoever they like. Oh "she did X so she is following principle Y", oh "He did Z so he is not following principle W". And of course these principles are vague as fuck like "be frugal".
Ooooor... you can not play russian roulette with your career.
Ober this I have also heard that people back stab their peers with their managers or the one they don't like.
SDE 2 bar seems to vary widely.
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The deployment pipeline is actually very good because we have auto deployment without manual intervals and everyone is responsible for their own deployment.
The boring thing is the internal infrastructure is quite good so less is learned but it is still enough for a junior engineer.
When I was looking for new job, MS is the only one low ball me. Others like Google give higher salary but lower level but not for FB.
I heard the Chinese SDE suicide because his manager put him to pip. The manager himself was pip then.
There are good managers and bad managers in Amazon. The problem here is manager in Amazon has so much power that could influence the engineer’s work life so your experience largely depends on your manager.
Although I also don’t recommend Amazon to others but the experience op mentioned is not always the case in Amazon :p