Amazon.com Reviews in Seattle, WA Area

Pros

-brand name (for now)
-being associated with the #1 Ecommerce company in the world
-bring pets to work
-casual dress
-#3 company admired by customers

Cons

-Confrontational environment, nothing is ever good enough...always grow grow grow. Exponential growth.
-It's a marathon, except that you're not jogging but always sprinting it.
-Pay sucks, they give you a below market salary but entice you with RSUs, but get this, the vesting period is not the traditional 25% over 4 years. Because the company has an employee retention problem majority of your RSUs don't vest until Years 3 & 4. It's a horrible carrot & stick.
-Average Amazon employee lifespan is 2yrs and declining. Why else would they have RSU vesting towards Yrs. 3 & 4 instead of evenly during Yrs. 1 & 2.
-Company treats vendors and employees the same...like crap.
-Mgmt rules by fear...employees are terrified to make a mistake because people get "called out" during Weekly meetings.
-Forget about being in a lean company. This place is anorexic. Mgmt doesn't care that there's only 1 person doing a 5 person job, but God forbid you make 1 mistake and you're dead.
-You would think a technology company would have systems to pull data much easier. What would take a few minutes with competent systems, employees have to use SQL & ETL queries to pull their own data. And trust me when I say the data never matches.
-Skills learned here are not very transferable to the outside world, because our systems are all homegrown.
-We have acronyms and abbreviations up the ying yang
-Mgmt is not consistent with goals and lacks processes. Everything is ad hoc and "winging it"
-Mgmt does not celebrate or showcase "wins" only losses. You would think the company is sinking when you walk around and see the stress and mood. But the company is doing well. But it's always spotlight on the negatives.
-While the rest of the world is growing 1-2% or declining, mgmt complains 45% growth YoY is not good enough
-Mgmt states we think long term, but every category leader is short term focused to hit their own metric goals. Many times 1 person's metric goals contradict another person's metric goals.
-Everyone is looking out for themselves with ulterior motives to meet their goals.
-Lastly, the company does nothing to develop employees. They hire the best & the brightest and expect them to run & run & run and eventually burn out.

Advice to Senior Management

The company is awesome if you're a customer. Where else can you order something online and magically have it delivered to your house in 2 days for free? I am a huge fan of the company...as an employee. But all this success and growth is placed on the backs of extremely overworked, unappreciated employees. MBAs are dropping like flies. They should utilized an attrition metric and see how many people actually leave after only 1 year. It's like the Wizard of Oz, when you finally look behind the curtain all you see is "glue & duct tape" holding this hole place together. Mgmt spends too much time looking at granular Week-over-Week data. We have weekly business reviews, monthly business reviews, quarterly business reviews. Employees spend hours & days to gather all this information to just drive looking through the review mirror. Constantly looking backwards.

Pros

Fast Paced, work on interesting and complex projects. The computers and equipment were newer. Free Happy Hour on Fridays

Cons

Managers are disrespectful. Yelling seems to be acceptable behaviour. No clear goals to be measured against. People from other departments are hostile and don't want to work with other departments for the common good. The yelling from the manager killed off all 7 contractors. The lead developer would yell over the slightest issue. It was later discovered he was fired from previous job because he couldn't get along with anyone.

Advice to Senior Management

Get manager's with some social skills. Yelling is not going to get you heard. Communicate changes in a respectable manner.

Pros

Amazon offers cutting edge technology, successful online retail, beautiful campus on South Lake Union in Seattle, and company name recognition.

Cons

Door desks, aversion to business and process standards, internal politics, pager duty, micro-management from the executive level, expensive parking, stingy benefits especially when compared to the industry, stock accounts with sub-standard brokerage house.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop treating employees like commodities that can be thrown away once they are 'used up'. Your data-center business practices are unsustainable, does ITIL not make sense to you? AWS is a mess, services are not secure by default, little thought is given to cross-service functionality and capacity planning is an afterthought left to inexperienced program managers.

Pros

Challenging, always an insurmountable mountain of work and opportunity.
The very best talent I have ever been a part of.
Impactful work that is felt by our customers.
Historic growth.

Cons

Throw Quality of Life out the window.
If you need accolades, don't come here.
If you want to develop and you need others to help you, don't come here.
Communication - very poor here. You have to bull ahead in a direction that feels right.

Advice to Senior Management

Take better care of your people. When the economy swings to the positive, we will run out of talent to hunt. Focus on retention and diversity, engagement and community support.

Pros

Looks great on your resume. :-) Once you're in, there are multiple opportunities to move around, learn new skills, and you can really create your own path up to a point. Beautiful campus, beautiful city (Seattle).

Cons

Terrible life-work balance. Everyone works so much overtime. If you don't do it too, it makes you look bad. The annual compensation review process at Amazon is one of the most tortuous I've ever experienced. No revenue-based performance bonuses, even when the company is having a stellar year.

Advice to Senior Management

Revamp the annual review process. Everyone at Amazon is a rock star, so laying off the rock star that either wasn't able to make themselves visible enough to be appreciated for their contribution or isn't represented well by their manager, is unfair. Don't throw the babies out with the bath water.

Pros

Amazon had a very competitive internship salary. It also provided a great chance to have ownership over a meaningful project.

Cons

Amazon had long hours and very tight deadlines. Many of the employees seemed stressed and contemplating a job change.

Pros

Fast pace; ownership; great brand; top company; great peers

Cons

Aggressive communication style; promotions are hard (high bar); people are rewarded for being jerks

Advice to Senior Management

Keep investing in employees and THEIR career growth (in addition to company's growth)

Pros

There are many things to work on in Amazon - there are few problems that are well solved and do not require further innovation. This can be a huge benefit when you come in to Amazon, there will definitely be something to which you can apply yourself.

Cons

A negative is that often you are dealing with all of the daily work and don't have the chance to make framework improvements or large-scale changes to the software you are working on. Too often stuck with finer details and management may not make time for the larger changes.

Advice to Senior Management

There are many ways the company asks you to work on big improvements. Through the leveling documents for promotions, for peer feedback, and the way the company lauds these efforts with other awards. However, there is little to no time allotted for this kind of work.

Pros

Good company that is growing fast and expanding. Has the potential to be a great company, Lot's of opportunity to move and grow in your career with good stock benefits if it keeps dominating the market.

Cons

Immaturity and Politics could kill this place. It runs a bit like a high school clique.The company is getting too big to continue to run on personal relationships so infrastructure is badly needed.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to people telling you your shoelace is untied. They are not trying to be negative rather, trying to keep you from falling down.

Pros

Challenging, very intelligent people, great product, new innovations, plenty of opportunity to move around the company and find a match for your skills & interests.

Cons

It's never enough...

Never enough time to do the work
Never enough work done to satisfy management.

Ultimately, frustrating for people who are high-achieving (which is everyone here at Amazon).

Advice to Senior Management

Is it really worth it to burn people out?