rating for Amazon.com

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 middle managers had no spine and would give yes to anything and then force engineers to work overtime to make up for the deadlines. You also had to be oncall for operation support and user support and ended up spending half of the time in support. Unlike software engineers, managers were not on-call for this operation and user support.

There was no process for software development, though some may call themselves agile but really was code and fix. Most of the development tools such as build, deploy, monitoring were in-house and full of bugs and you ended up spending most of the nights fighting those. They also gave pretty bad desktops and laptops to engineers. You didn't feel very excited about the development environment. I found in most cases managers wanted quick solution so you end up sacrificing testing and that further increased operation load. They valued fast delivery at the cost of quality and high operation & maintenance cost. Obviously engineers had to pay for all this by working more overtime.

In addition to lack of any respect, Amazon is very stingy company that offers very basic medical, no education or tuition reimbursement. It only seven holidays and you end up working most of the holidays because that is busy time. Though, there were some smart people at Amazon, but Amazon had high turnover due to production support and lack of respect. Some just waited until they got their stocks and then left. I was glad to be out of there and work on my own.

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