rating for Amazon.com

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 spent keeping the existing systems running. Not maintaining code, literally keeping the systems running. Planning migrations from one version of the operating system to the next, allocating hardware, deploying, backfilling your caches, handling the fallout from network events, handling urgent requests from business groups. Some teams have more operational load than others. Much more.

The plus side is that you're working with brilliant people, and dealing with scaling problems that almost no one else has. With the variety of stuff you need to handle, and the complexity of the problems, it's an excellent training ground for someone who wants to be the CTO of a startup.

Amazon has a culture of cheapness which is fairly annoying. Desktop and laptop equipment is not the best that money could buy, it's barely adequate for the job.

Turnover is very high -- leaving at two years is very common, and many people don't even make it that long. At a recent tech-talk by one of our senior managers, he mentioned that the team had 200% turnover while he was there -- three years.

Promotion between levels (there are three levels for engineers -- plus the big wig engineers, so four) is ill-defined.

Office space is often very tight, and the cafeteria at PacMed is not good. The location is convenient, though.

It's a very good spot for a junior engineer, right out of college, getting their feet wet. You'll learn more than at any other company, and faster too. Curiously, it's also a good place for older employees -- I haven't seen the usual age discrimination there, and you see lots of grey haired developers (surely they cannot all have gone grey early!).

I don't regret coming to Amazon, but I also don't think I'll hit the three year mark.

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