Amazon Web Services Senior Software Development Engineer reviews

* The company culture in more recent years does not seem to adhere to their own Leadership Principles as much as it used to. * The company used to value bottom-up decision-making a lot more. More recent years have been trending toward more top-down mandates and micromanagement. * Senior leadership is not what it used to be. * The company is very much all-in on generative AI. This applies both to the leadership's direction for the company, as well as how employees are expected to use it. * High pressure environment with an emphasis on moving fast is not for everyone. Moving fast also means frequent churn. * Maintaining a work-life balance can be challenging if you are not intentional about it. * Oncall support can be draining. Some organizations invest in operational improvements better than others.

Leadership is only concerned with the stock price; the "customer" in Customer Obsession is major shareholders. Employees are an expense to be eliminated, and the people buying things (retail, Prime, AWS) are just another resource to be ruthlessly exploited. The Leadership Principals are a bludgeon used against employees, and ignored by senior leaders, but a constant stream of propaganda reminds you that as an employee, you need to follow them at all times. Constant gaslighting about the need for Frugality leads to stupid, short-term decision making, including no raises and severely reduced RSU grants, all while making 10+% YoY profit gains regardless of the overall economy. That doubles profit about every four years, but it's not shared with the people doing the work. "It's always Day 1!" is the biggest lie. This is just another huge, slow, stupid company in decline. It'll take a long time to get there, but Amazon will eventually be as irrelevant as HP or IBM, another victim of the cult of infinite growth. Don't believe the recruiters when they tell you it's "easy" to switch teams here; you go through a full interview loop just to transfer. Promotions are also a joke once you get to L6, everyone above that is a gatekeeper glorying in their past accomplishments.