Coderific

culling 10% of employees a year posted on July 26, 2010

I've recently heard that Kalpanik S. has published a book called Inside the Giant Machine: An Amazon.com Story.

In his book he talks of the cruelty curve in which Amazon fires 10% of its employees a year. A selected employee is put on a performance plan and fired soon afterwards.

In my group in the space of 6 months, 5 software developers were either fired or strongly encouraged to resign and two managers lost or resigned their managerial positions.

So more...

Slice of paradise posted by cmagoyrk on October 17, 2008

I work for IMDb which is owned by Amazon. It is an amazing place to work. It has the benefits of a large corporation (ready access to hardware, good health insurance and benefits, good salary) and the benefits of a small corporation (know everyone by name, friendly culture, ability to really make a difference). Developers are given a large amount of autonomy, provided with everything neccessary to produce great code, and are expected to deliver. On the more...

Like working for Initech in Office Space posted on July 29, 2008

Amazon will pay you well. The only perks I can think of: bus pass, miscellaneous unimpressive discounts<end of list>

Amazon has a culture of build it quick, launch the prototype and let the developers nurse it along with a pager whenever something breaks at 4am.

There are good teams at Amazon, apparently, but I didn't get to work on any of them.

From what I can tell upper management's primary responsibility is for blaming the people below them for more...

Worst Interview Ever posted by chakotay2329 on May 22, 2008

I never worked there, but I can say the interview process was absolutely the worst. I nearly walked out in the middle it was so bad. Most of the interview process was asking questions from text books with twists. For example, reverse a string of words like "The time is now" to be "now is time The". Not so bad, but expect hours and hours of this on both the phone interview and the in person. Since I needed to start my day from Portland, more...

Amazon violates h1b visa rules posted on April 24, 2008

I was fired by Amazon.com before the end of the H1B work visa I held expired. The rules state that if employment is terminated before the end of 3 years, the employer has to pay the air fare back home. Amazon.com did not.

They tried their best to make me resign over a period of a few months before finally firing me. This was worse than a rule violation as it was a constant verbal battering over near imaginary problems.

It seemed a common theme at that time more...

Work here if you lack self respect & workaholic !! posted on February 07, 2008

I joined Amazon about three years ago knowing its good reputation as online retail store and due to amazon web services. However, I found that there was complete lack of respect for software engineers. There were fifty layers of managers between Jeff Bezos and you and all those middle management were full of bozos. I often saw managers mistrust engineers and even yell at engineers. I also saw managers took credit for good work of the engineers. Most of the more...

Good place to work, if you can find the right team posted on February 07, 2008

I read a lot of the reviews of Amazon on this site, and as an employee for over two years with a totally different experience, I felt that I needed to provide my opinion.

It may well be true that there is plenty of legacy code in certain areas of the company and that the pager duty on those teams is hellish. But I can only speak directly about teams I've worked on. Since I've been at Amazon, I've written large amounts of new code for new applications, more...

Massive legacy codepiles... posted on January 31, 2008

Most of the SDEs here spend most of their time trying to keep the hack-filled legacy systems alive, rather than doing any development or engineering.

Computing resources... minimal. Amazon buys budget computers for everyone, and refuses to retire them until they're three years old, so it's quite common for developers to be working on computers that haven't even been in production for a year or two, and weren't anywhere close to state of the art when Amazon more...

take medical leave, get fired posted on December 27, 2007

I have some misgivings about using a terrible misfortune to illustrate what goes on in some portions of Amazon.com, but without mentioning specific cases what I write may lack authority.

Earlier this year, Amazon.com terminated the employment of Gardner Cohen who was on medical leave at the time. Gardner was suffering from leukemia and died earlier this year. Amazon.com terminated Gardner at a time when he was expending his energies getting well again. more...

Good hop to a better place posted on November 18, 2007

They have the smartest people. Some real great jobs, and at the same time some really lousy jobs. Pay well. But are a stingy company for other benefits. Really bad retention rates. I can never seem to understand why they require that many engineers. Nobody cares for a developer's time, I guess because they never really ship software to a customer. Have to justify each and every change to millions of people and have them approve it. Have to get redirected to more...

A Spoiled Child posted on August 27, 2007

I'll try not to reiterate what other reviews have said. For me, the biggest issue was the substantial, intentional, and systematic job misrepresentation that Amazon practices. I moved across the country for a development position only to find out that I was supposed to spend 1/4th of my life on call, 24x7. You won't see the on call listed in any job descriptions, but every software developer position has a "support burden." None of the many more...

Innovative company that is evolving posted on August 01, 2007

Our all Amazon is a solid tech company with a lot of opportunity to prove yourself and help 60+ million customers everyday.

Amazon not only survived the dot com bust but emerged as the leader in e-commerce and innovative services company.

Amazon's retail side still has old school people that don't entirely get software and there is a lot of legacy code but other parts of Amazon are very exciting and innovative.

Being a dot bust surviver Amazon benefits more...

Amazon isn't for everyone, but it can be great. posted on July 08, 2007

Amazon isn't for everyone. It can be a pain in the ass. On certain projects, at certain times of the year, with certain managers and colleagues life can suck. The horror stories you may have heard about being on-call were probably all true. There have been numerous times where I was ready to quit. But, there's something about Amazon that has kept me from quiting even after the unreal number of years that I have been working here.

There are few other places in more...

Worst. Company. Ever. posted on February 12, 2007

IF you're lucky, you get a decent boss who knows how to program and who shields you from the BS and goes to bat with the pointy hairs. But this can only last so long-- eventually you'll be reorganized into a group where your boss is a pointy hair. This is what happened to me, and it was the most asinine, childishly incompetant situation I've ever seen-- worse, the whole amazon culture is one of arrogance.

Arrogance is tolerable when you're dealing with more...

A good place to work posted on February 11, 2007

I've heard plenty of complaints from people about the on-call duty at Amazon, but any company that's been around for more than a year is going to have teams that must support legacy software that is poorly designed by current standards. Also like all companies, Amazon has it's fair share of bad managers & teams but there are also plenty of teams at Amazon that are really enjoyable and don't have massive amounts of pager-duty.

The team that I'm on is more...

Work hard, have fun, MADE history posted on December 23, 2006

Amazon's semi-official recruitment motto used to be "Work hard, have fun, make history." I joined in 2001, and even then it seemed that the "make" should have been "made". I didn't really care about that much then, but now more than ever, Amazon is HISTORY. Specifically all the glory years are behind it. The stock performance has been floating at about the same price for the last 3 years, no major gains, indicating that no one more...

Hate your job - why stay? posted on December 20, 2006

I read these bitter employees at Amazon, and am amazed at why all of them are still there? Hmmmmm I read that 1 of them is there after 3 years, but hates it? What kinda person is this? Is there view really valid?

A website that allows this sort of free form crying about past employment has to be posted is seriously diemented. Should be called "bitter employee website".

Any college educated person knows that everyone complains about things, more...

Worst job, Rude people posted on November 26, 2006

I've been working for Amazon.com through a temp agency, and I have to say its about the worst job I've ever had. The managers are rude and look at you like they are King and you are just a peasant that should be worshiping them. They give OT at the last minute, let us know we had off for Thanksgiving the day before, so nobody could make plans earlier, and watch every single move you make like each employee is in third grade. Its always good to be safe at more...

not. getting. better. posted on October 14, 2006

First off, go back and read "Company Won't Grow Up," since it already says most of what I would have said already. I don't agree with every single observation, but it's certainly close enough.

After 3+ years at Amazon in engineering and engineering mgmt roles, I find myself constantly surprised each day that

--anybody actually comes to work
--we sell and ship a single product

Let's look at some of the facts, shall we?

--Engineering life is more...

Glad I'm Gone posted on October 12, 2006

I worked for 3 years, until late 2005.

Ego-driven company with a strong practice towards cronyism. That's great if you are from the companies and schools that are worshipped, terrible otherwise.

They try to portray meritocracy. Really, that's only true if you fit a very narrow mold and are willing to make AMZN your #1 priority in life (over sleep, compensation, relationships). Managers noted when you weren't there before them, left before them. Many people more...

Company Won't Grow Up posted by rash on October 08, 2006

Experiences recent as of 2006.

Classical problem of mid-life company that still pretends to be a start up. Continues to use processes that though once somewhat successful, don't scale to the current size of the company.

Launch fixation. Amazon is always looking for new business at the expense of everything else. Maintenance to existing, even mission critical, software limited to 3 a.m. pager panics and quick band-aid fixes. Lots of really bad old code to more...

Amazon, maintainance interfers with project work posted on October 05, 2006

I worked at Amazon.com from 2001 - 2002.

The highpoint of my time at Amazon.com was being told that I was less likely to lose my job if I did a newcomer's share of pager duty! This was at a particularly bad time as I had project work to finish and had only just recently done another lot of pager duty. (Pager duty is when you have to carry a pager and respond to any moderate to severe website problems immediately and also carry out a set list of duties.)
more...

Great learning experience, but high turnover posted on October 04, 2006

Amazon has managed to really capture the feel of a startup company -- developers have their hands in everything, whether they want it or not.

A few things that new hires are often unpreprared for:
* Oncall -- engineers are typically part of an oncall rotation for the features their group owns. This is usually 1 week of 24/7 pager duty. Recently, they've made engineers the first teir of support for the databases.

* Operational load -- about 30% of your time is more...

It's Still Day One posted on September 06, 2006

This is one of Bezos favorite sayings. I think he means to imply the positive connotations, like, uhm, you can still make a lot of money, there's still room to innovate and change the web. It also seems to ring true of the negative connotations, like, let's all work day and night, we have no reliable process to repeat successes and we don't learn from failure.

Amazon does have some things going for it. It's downtown Seattle (or Beacon Hill) location. It's more...

lost in space. ( 1 post ) updated August 20, 2009 08:53 AM