Amazon.com Reviews

Pros

- They are working on some of the most interesting products today

Cons

- Not a friendly place to work
- Not a happy place, like most tech companies are

Advice to Senior Management

- Improve the MBA hiring. The criteria you use right now is extremely arbitrary

Pros

Tremendous ability to make changes. Increasing use of lean production principles creates a great laboratory to master LEAN. Work with the smartest group of people imaginable and move at breakneck speed. Make an impact bigger than yourself.

Cons

Managers are servants and garner much less respect than the hourly employee, a good thing up to a point that is often surpassed. Meanwhile the hours can be quite long and there is tremendous ambiguity matched with a high degree of accountability.

Advice to Senior Management

Appreciate your managers, trust their judgement, and assume they intend to do the right things.

Pros

Constant innovation, smart people, good career advancement available

Cons

High expectations, long hours, culture varies significantly by team

Pros

Great growth opportunities. Work with a lot of talened employees. Constantly pushing the envelop when it comes to innovation on a daily basis.

Cons

Long work hours and a high level of committment. While the constant change makes it a very dynamic environment but there is also not much downtime.

Advice to Senior Management

Create a better work life balance and work on more positive re-inforcement. Balance the demands of work with more than compensation.

Pros

Good medical and dental benefits.
Stock options

Cons

Management does not have a clue what they are doing. Impossible productivity expectations with high unreachable standards that management can't even maintain. HR needs to do their job and stop branding people who are pointing out to them the real issues that face workers on the frontlines. Being customer centric is great but the company must learn to maintain the people who help make this company so great. I been with the company for seven years and I cringe to think wat seven more years would be like at the rate the company is going by not investing more into their employees

Advice to Senior Management

Be proper leaders not power tripping goons. Empower your employees. Make working at amazon fun again then we can continue to make history worth remembering.

Pros

Working with some super-smart people. Brand prestige is fantastic for future career.

Cons

The bland corporate offices in Slough are a long way from the dotcom vibe you might be looking for.

Pros

Some areas of work are challenging
Friendly coworkers
Many opportunities to advance
Monthly bonuses and inexpensive health insurance
Fun environment

Cons

Long hours (alot of overtime, especially during peak season)
No tuition reimbursement (offering this would help them promote from within)
Amount of employees during peak season (parking lot, break rooms and other areas are so crowded with people that it can make for an unpleasant day)

Advice to Senior Management

Offer more incentives to old and new employees to keep them motivated
Look into offering tuition reimbursement (anything helps struggling students)
More recognition for good performance

Pros

Good pay, benefits, freedom to move around, ability to peruse good ideas.

Cons

Operational load. Occasionally non-engineers make engineering decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

Allocate more resources where they are needed.

Pros

Good place to learn about operation. Good place to learn about cloud computing and commerce work flow. Great infrastructure. Nice wiki to share info.

Cons

Pager duty. Deployment black out windows. Perl codes are hard to read. VPN is slow. Engineers have to spend too much time on supporting customers.

Pros

The salary and signing bonus are pretty good.
Amazon might look good on your resume.
You may gain a good reference or two.

Cons

Pay is ultimately lower than most companies, due to the number of hours required to perform the three jobs you are doing, for the one job offer you accepted.
Too many meetings, not enough meeting minutes.
Lack of communication between departments.
Fighting fires daily can grow tiresome.
Unrealistic project deployment dates.
No work/life balance.

Advice to Senior Management

Look at the attrition rates by department and focus on retaining your employees like you focus on keeping your customers. If you don't respect your own workers, then don't expect them to stay very long.