Amazon screws employees in ways unseen in other companies. From the perspective of an engineer, this is a terrible place for people to work and grow. To list a few things:
- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself!
- No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!
SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.
The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.
- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself! - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!
SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.
The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.
* I worked at AWS for 2 years.