1) Hiring Process:
* I was not given enough time to prepare for the interview
* Negotiation process is 'transactional': low balls, high pressure, questionable tactics
* I was sold a 'senior' position. It turns out to be a SDE2 (you will find people 1 year out of college at that level)
2) Onboarding:
* Pretty much not existent
* I identified a team before joining. I was put on a different team on Day 1, and I found out on Day 1... I should have quit right there...
* It is common to be 'loaned' (you don't have a say on this). They will send you to another team for some months. Then you come back maybe. Play it right or it might impact your career in a negative way.
3) Compensation
* They will get you for the lowest salary possible if you don't negotiate properly (go take a class)
* The RSUs slow vesting (only 5% after 1 year) is horrible. The worst in the industry. They are desperate to keep people around longer and it's not even working (more on the turnover later).
* Salary compression is fast. You will find out about new hires making more than you quite rapidly. On the other hand, you might be making more than someone senior to you (if that helps).
* Salary increases are ridiculously low. Even if you exceed expectation you will get something lower than the inflation rate
* You might get a raise by threatening to leave or showing up with another offer in your hands (be careful with both tactics).
* Seriously, you will get a better salary at an established startup. If Amazon is within the top 5 tech companies then it is the most frugal for sure.
4) Workforce
* Half of the workforce are SDE1s out of college -> they don't know what they are doing. Almost the other half are SDE2s recently promoted -> they think they know what they are doing and they don't. SDE3s are rare and it's almost impossible to get there. I've never worked in the same org with a Principal, it's like a unicorn.
* Turnover is too damn high! I've witnessed many people quitting within 6 months. Knowledge is lost in the process. No, there is no documentation. Of course the best people are the ones who leave...
* You will find more stubborn people, very opinionated, and with a stronger ego than in other companies. "Disagree and Commit" is the worst tenet I've ever heard of and it is responsible for a stressful and inefficient workplace.
5) Systems
* Bad legacy systems everywhere. Awful spaghetti code everywhere. Half of your time you will be fighting fires.
* Lots of proprietary stuff -> you'll master plenty of 'not transferable' skills -> your new skills will be useless on your next job
* You will be stuck in a hybrid mix of legacy networks, AWS, and something in between that is the surrogate of a transition program that will last till 2020+
* Teams are not aware of who is doing what. Lots of duplicate work. Waste of time.
* Build system, dependency management, and deployment systems are non sense. They will try to convince you otherwise. Keep an eye on this because once they do you'll know that you stopped thinking with your own head. After 2 years I still don't know how to add a java dependency to a project or what this thing called ION is... Luckily they migrated to git.
* It's a management company. Managers will get promoted, SDEs won't. Getting to SDE3 is like making it to the top of the Everest. Thinking about making the move to management? At Amazon, think twice.
* There is not much learning going on. You might not want to learn the 'Amazon way' of doing things anyway. If you want to learn something read a book.
* Too. Many. Meetings. & Too. Much. Writing. & Too. Many. Strict. Deadlines.
7) Other
* Perks? Bad compared to the rest of the industry. Lowlights: 401k matching takes 3 years to vest.
* You will hate your pager like you'll never hate anything else in your life. You will get paged because of other people hacks. You will not be given the time to fix those hacks. You will get paged again for the same thing. I've seen people getting 30 Sev2/week easily.
* Seattle is full of engineers. Strangers will have fun guessing if you work for Amazon or Microsoft (they will still guess the latter first). The 'Seattle freeze' is a thing, google it. Also, it's getting very expensive quickly.
* You'll move office/building 3 times/year on average. You'll go through a reorg/year. Your manager might change once a year.
