Amazon Software Engineer II reviews

3.4

58% would recommend to a friend

(303 total reviews)
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Andrew Jassy

17% approve of CEO

54% positive business outlook

Software Engineer II employees have rated Amazon with 3.4 out of 5 stars, based on 303 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Engineer II professionals have a good working experience there. Amazon is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Engineer II professionals compared to other employers within the Tecnologías de la información industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

303 reviews
5.0
Jan 15, 2010
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Extremely smart people. Very open communication. I probably learnt more there in 1 year than all of my education and past work experiences combined. Casual dress code. Total ownership of product.

Cons

Total ownership of product. You are responsible for design, development, test, deployment and maintenance. On-call rotations play a bit of havoc with work-life balance, but definitely manageable.

2.0
Dec 17, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- End to end ownership. - Good money - Smaller teams and flatter heirarchy - EMphasis on performance, quality and scalability - Good benefits - medical, home drop. - Stocks! RSUs!

Cons

- No trust in upper management - Poor product management - Long working hours - Operational maintenance is cumbersome and stressful - People management and HR is not competitive. Especially the HR team is very immature and hurts good hiring decisions

3.0
May 16, 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Amazon hires very smart, reasonable people. While people are A-types, people are cooperative and willing to work toward the greater good -- customers. That said, it is _very_ customer focused with a very strong corporate culture. The technologies available to work on are world-class, albeit it can take time to learn it all as much of it is steeped in tribal knowledge.

Cons

Work-life balance is tenuous at best. Even in relaxed areas, the only way to get ahead is to put in a lot of over-time. Some areas talk of 40-hour weeks, this is what it takes to just stay afloat. This can lead to lone warriors pushing changes to team code. A lot of agile team de-evolve into ad-hoc processes. A lot of work is geared toward maintenance engineering than cutting-edge engineering; the challenge is to remain stimulated. Operational support can vary from team to team, in some instances being on-call is minimal; in others it can drown you.

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