rating for Amazon.com

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 people I interviewed with, including recruiters, explained the on call schedule. With one week out of four essentially working 168 hours, you are working 1.8x normal hours for the salary they specify. While on call, you can't really leave home without your laptop, power adapter, cables and ivpn device and you must stay within 20 minutes of an internet connection. You may be woken up multiple nights a week, sometimes several times a night. This will disrupt your life and most likely your family's life as well.

Before you take a job with Amazon, BE SURE you have the complete details about the on call you'll be doing. How many people will be in the rotation (subtract 1; the attrition rate appears to be around 18% per year.) What is the average number of pages per week during off peak? During peak? How much development will you actually do? How much support?

If you are relocating, be sure you are ready to deal with Seattle real estate costs and traffic; decide whether you want to be here if Amazon doesn't work out. Typically if you want a house and aren't rich, you are looking at 45 minute commute each way. Remember to factor in the commute as well as the on call time to your workday. Seattle is a wonderful, but trafficy place.

Benefits:
Medical/vision/dental: yes, pretty average coverage
401k: better than contracting companies, worse than competitors. Match up to half of 4%. Also note that this will not vest for 1 year and is automatically put into Amazon stock. Fund choice is average.
Pension/savings plan: no

Diversity/community:
Diversity: black employees' network. No company statement on diversity, older workers, women in computing.
Commitment to the environment: none that I could find. Granted, Amazon's footprint consists largely of cardboard boxes, but they don't seem to have bothered with even a pro forma "we care about the environment" page.
Commitment to community: none I could find (e.g. corporate sponsorships, donations). Occasionally they will highlight what the employees are doing for their communities.
Matching donation programs: no (compare Google, Microsoft, IBM who all match charitable grants generously.)
Education reimbursement: Rumored to exist but I couldn't find any formal documentation of it. There are lecture series and "fishbowls" where you get to hear authors speak about their works.

Other stuff:
Computers: mostly Dell laptops, highly managed (no installing your junk). You get an RSA key and a book bag along with your pager. Take care of the book bag--you have to turn it in when you leave, along with everything else!
For developers, you get a Linux desktop, but getting anything working on it, including Eclipse or the code repository, can be a bit of an undertaking. Nothing is preinstalled, but you can install pretty much anything.
Snacks: coffee, tea, cocoa and hot and cold water are free.
Office supplies: ok. Note that you often end up buying your own pager batteries which for some reason I found highly annoying ( you may not care.)
Work-life balancing: you can figure this one out.
Exit interview: online form (really...I guess so many people leave they can't be bothered!) You do get 30 minutes for HR to tell you what to sign and so on, so you can impart you parting wisdom then if you think it will help.

Idiosyncrasies:
-Interviewing: Amazon loves to interview. Because of the turnover, you'll probably be asked to start doing interviews within 6-9 months. Some people really enjoy this, but the write ups afterward take time.
-The high hiring bar: Amazon believes in hiring only the best; which makes for hiring a lot of excellent and bored developers who spend a lot of time on support. This also contributes to some corporate arrogance as others have mentioned as well as a lot of intelligence.
-Customers: Amazon is not very interested in individual customer problems. Due to the low margins, there have to be hundreds affected before there is much interest in an issue. If you have a customer service background, you may find this frustrating.
-People: very smart, but very homogenous and very young (many right out of grad school.) Amazon's interviewing system and fondness for people with a "bias for action" and a particular set of core competencies means they pretty much hire the same guy, at least personality-wise, every time. Fun and bright, but there are few with experience either at Amazon or elsewhere. Large bias towards reinventing anything and everything.
-Training: 1/2 day orientation. You're smart, you'll figure it all out.

Developer stuff:
-QA: surprisingly quality-free. There is little testing before release and no tracking of post release problems. Testing your code can be challenging, to say the least. Some teams have QA; others don't.
-Internal tools: some very good, many half-finished and abandoned by those who left long before.
-Defect tracking: no standard--pretty much roll your own.
-Other quirks: documentation may be in a wiki, an older wiki, or your team's database. Where is the stuff you need? Write a search engine!
-You'll also probably be primary support for a database, which means mostly forwarding pages to the dba. You do like beeping, right?

While any one of these things might not bother you, overall they do paint a good picture of the Amazon corporate personality. Like a very smart, very spoiled child, Amazon doesn't believe it owes anyone--its employees, its individual customers or its community--much of anything, given its obvious superiority. I won't mention how much of its shareholders' equity it destroyed with ventures like Webvan (apparently now reborn as fresh.amazon.com) since the stock is currently in good shape.

Amazon may be a great place for you, but be sure you know what you are getting into before you sign your life away. Otherwise you may end up financially disadvantaged, emotionally drained, intellectually dulled and professionally discombobulated!

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