Pros

Forward thinking mentality. Customer centric. Smart colleagues. Good learning experience for how to be frugal, work harder than you ever have and get no feedback or praise in return.

Cons

The intensity would be too much for anyone to deal with. It is very normal for senior-management to yell at each other in large groups and employees. Managers get right in your face. I've always been on the top tier of employee reviews which doesn't matter. Everyone at Amazon is anxiously waiting to get out. So many statements and commitments were broken from the time I interviewed to the time I got the job. My boss changed his tune about almost every issue.

Advice to Senior Management

Monitor your senior leadership. Encourage enthusiasm and happiness. Enforce a zero tolerance for hostile work environments. Be honest and straightforward.

Pros

Innovative
New projects and challenges
Strong emphasis on operational safety

Cons

Not enough time and resources given to establish anything for the long term
Favoritism in promotions
No respect for tenure. Company seems content on high turnover in Area Manager ranks

Advice to Senior Management

Respect and commit to the development of Area Managers. Reward managers that make the company successful year after year.

Pros

Challenging work - which means you learn a lot.
Somewhat of an open door policy, where you can talk to senior management.
High level of responsibility but equally rewarding financially and professionally.
Lots of smart people.

Cons

Too many meetings that sometimes seemed like a waste of time.
A lot of known issues that have not been fixed for long periods of time really surprised me.
Almost everyone is overworked, putting in over 40 hours a week. Probably closer to 50, and especially senior management.
Sometimes there was lack of direction, so you have to figure things out for yourself.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on fixing known problems that drain more money than new projects bring in. I saw a lot of this and nobody seemed to care.

Pros

Pros

For someone leaving the Military, Amazon was a good place to go. They aggressively recruit and find new talent. It made finding my job here very easy. The base salary is a good wage and if you plan on sticking around, the stocks and bonuses are very good. The company does grow every year so there are new opportunities elsewhere in the company if you are willing to move.

Cons

Cons

There is a revolving door for both managers and hourly associates. The leadership structure is extraordinarily flat, leaving almost no room for promotion for the hourly associates. As for managers, a lot of their aggressive recruiting currently is focused almost entirely on MBA students who enter at the base management level and then get auto-promoted on a semi regular basis. This is as long as they don't screw anything up too bad.

   The 401K plan is terrible. It matches 1/2% up to 4% (in other words you put up 4% and get only 2% match). You are only vested in the plan after 3 years which is longer than the average young professional stays at a single job. When the annual review comes around and compensation is increased, it is always at the cost of another pay. So if you get more base pay, you get less in bonus or stocks and vice versa. The only way to make more then what you are currently making is to get promoted. As somebody on this site already mentioned, the only way for this to happen is to work so much and long that senior management feels sorry for you.

   The company also somehow manages to mess up the ramp up to the holiday season every year. Even though we have multiple planning meetings before and after peak, we are not able to staff correctly. It is mostly due to the companies unwillingness to have one extra employee rather than be short by 10. This leads to managers and associates alike getting burnt out during peak.

Advice to Senior Management

Advice to Senior Management

Communicate with your associates more. Rethink not having more intermediate leadership positions. These associates who fill new slots will get valuable leadership experience and will be monetarily compensated for their more difficult work. Then they might take more pride in their jobs and they will do them better. It could also lead to more internal promotions.

Pros

New exciting technology, problems and challenges. Lots of smart people. Now focused on improving developer experience and making improvements to development ecosystem.

Cons

Frugality taken to Cheapness and not investing in right things internally. High turnover rate until recession hit. Pretending to be a start up but really a corporation with increasing bureaucracy and HR ridden rather than the feeling of a company where people know each other. Not focused on individual development and growing people to next level. Have a lot of mini-cultures so a diverse culture in different department and organization which is good if you are under a progressive management hierarchy or hell if you are in the wrong organization. Do not recommend Operations organization to software developers very hectic and heavy on supporting old legacy hacked low quality software.

Advice to Senior Management

Your customer focus is awesome now treat your internal customers (employees) same or better than your external customers they are both your ambassadors and implementers of your future. Hire less but high quality HR people.

Pros

* Open-ended, challenging, and interesting problems

* Compensation is proportional to the importance of what you deliver

* Very customer-focused

* You have the power to make some of your job what you want

Cons

* EXTREMELY resource constrained, and chronically under-staffed in all areas (I've seen this over all of the past 6+ years I've worked here). Research projects are almost never approved, unless it's on your own time.

* Pager duty. This wouldn't be so bad if you were given the chance to build things the right way, and fix existing problems.

* Lack of respect for engineers by business analysts and management. Examples: 1) analyst can page an engineer any time-of-day, but the reverse is not true: analysts don't carry pagers; 2) graduates from top schools being asked to do tech support for the business folks.

* Penny-wise, pound-foolish: Cheapness to the point where you don't have all the tools you need to do your job most effectively. In many cases, the ROI for being frugal is negative, since you're paying an expensive engineer to spend many hours building/operating around a bureaucratic enforcement. Example: You're asked to deploy your app for use by teams in a new region, but the simple task of trying to get a new host allocated in a data center requires lots of paperwork, PLUS V.P. approval!

* People are packed so close together in the cubes/offices that noise prevents others from getting work done; also leads to health/sanitary issues: spread of disease (everyone gets sick when the kids head back to school in September).

* Suck-it-up mentality: While there are nuggets of "big, cool projects," the majority of software engineering work could be done by entry-level programmers.

* You're encouraged to grow on your own time, not the company's.

Advice to Senior Management

1. In the past six years, your flatly-organized company has become very top-heavy. Politics are rampant where they didn't use to exist at all. You need to eliminate 60-70% of your management staff. Then, you'll have tons of open head count for more engineers: The people in your company that actually innovate and do the real work.

2. Have you looked at your attrition rates, compared to other companies that hire the top talent? You have a high hiring bar for Software Engineers, and then use them for mostly "grunt work." This doesn't make any sense.

Pros

Amazon is the kind of company you'd go to, when you want to earn your programming chops. I know so many awesome developers who started out at Amazon before they moved on to bigger better things. You'd think that a company with a core value of frugality wouldn't have some of the best salaries and benefits of all the big tech companies, but you'd be wrong.

Cons

Source code wise, Amazon as a company isn't a huge contributor to the programming community - there seems to be a real reluctance to share and collaborate outside of the company, or work on open source software.

Advice to Senior Management

Yearly planning is an amazingly painful process. There must be someway to streamline it.

Pros

My experience at amazon was a good one. I learned more there in 6 months then i did in 2 years at my other job.

Cons

The hour can be very long and times. How you like it all depends on your team and your manager.

Advice to Senior Management

Evaluate manager more often, to make your they are actually managing there teams and not throw work at them last minute, then throwing them under the bus when it doesn't get done on time.

Pros

Decent Stock grants after 2 year mark
A lot of exposure to LSS and Process Improvement

Cons

Extremely low pay
Micro management by barely competent senior management
Absolute lack of work/life balance
Middle management and below treated poorly by the company
Abnormally high employee turnover rate

Advice to Senior Management

Too late to fix systemic problems

Pros

The people here are the best and brightest that I have worked with. The level of responsibility and input into the company's direction is amazing.

Cons

I have been at the company for a long time and have had 8 different managers. My experience has been largely dependent on the quality of my manager. That can be hit or miss.

Advice to Senior Management

make sure that you are directing your employees to do what you are actually expecting of them. More than once, I have worked hard to do what I thought was being asked of me, only to find that my success was being measured through something else entirely.