Amazon reviews

Operations or "on-call" - which is split between in hours and out of hours sucks it's the worst kind of operations, you can only compare it to the chinese/indian sweatshops in which kids work for a dollar for the entire week. They expect you to be "on-call" during the week form 6h to 18h (with 20min response time to tickets and less than that for conference calls), which entails that you are tethered to a high speed internet connection (so you have to stay at home) and only if you are engaged for more then 4h you are entitled to half a day off, which you have to take within next two weeks. For morning on-call (6-10AM)) you don't get anything except that now you should get to work by 12h instead of 10h. Daily on-call is plagued by constant pages and working the ticket queue, after which I sometimes think that dying is not that bad Working hours - they expect you to work 10-18h, which totally sucks IMHO, so you can have meetings with the US teams which in turn want them to start at 18h so you end up staying even more then the expected, but usually expect to be working from 9h to 18:30h at least. Work/life balance totally sucks, once my manager told me I should do something after work hours, i politely declined now he just gives me more work and there is no chance I can do it during office hours Frugality - it gets annoying after some time that the company is not willing to provide for anything, even some of the coffe machines were purchased by the employees, while on the other hand other companies provide lots of stuff Internal tools - suck and are over engineered and a nightmare to work with Location - Kilmainham Square is a shit-hole of Dublin.

Worked in Dublin office more than 4 years - It is not a global company and I don't think they want Amazon to be one. Shut down all offices except the ones in Seattle today and it will continue 99% of its operations fine. - If you are not based in Seattle, accept limited visibility and slower career progress for yourself. - All the tools you will be spending nights to figure out are internally developed, so there is no use of this experience outside except AWS services you are exposed to. - Due to internally developed tooling everywhere, you will be working far from open source/commercial solutions exist on market. - Contradicting leadership principles allows your manager/peers to knock you out or praise about you depending on what he/she wants to do. - High performance culture is internally interpreted as step over others to climb up culture unless you are a genius. - If you are type of the individual(a political animal) who will not mind to crush anyone in your path to succeed, Amazon is a great place. No one will stop you as long as you have enough political(not technical) skills to project how good you are and how bad others in your team are. - If you are type of individual who cares his/her team and team goals, you will be penalised for your good intentions in the process. And when you question it, you will be thrown at couple of leadership principles and told that your career is %100 your responsibility. So unless you end up with a good manager(actually good ones don't last as culture doesn't want them to be supportive and good to their directs), you are always in danger and eventually going to leave. - Office environment is pretty bad in meaning of positive energy. Burned out engineers who never smiles at work shouldering heavy on-call duties due to duct taping approach to bad solutions everywhere. - Anyone joins as level 4-5 engineer in an office outside of Seattle should expect to spend 8-10 years to be promoted to Level 7/Principal even they exchange their life for it. - If you are not based in Seattle, accept that you will hear important details after you missed the opportunity to react or grab it and nobody will care as everything in Seattle is awesome. - Work/life balance doesn't exist and it will drain you quick. - Stress of covering your corner everyday doesn't worth it. - Health insurance for family is not fully covered - Pension plan is below average (3% if you don't contribute)