Amazon work/life balance and employee satisfaction? (place to live, friendly)

[PNWGuy]

yes that is true, and often times the better the stock price is performing, the more hours folks work

[seattlenextyear]

From my husband's experience:

Pros:
Good salary, signing/retention bonuses, opportunities for promotion, training etc.

Lots of opportunities to move to different groups within the company after your first year (you're stuck in one place for the first year though)

Some groups are open to occasional telecommuting (ask your manager). So you can stay home and work if you have a cold, the plumber is coming, your child is sick, etc.

My husband works about 8-9 hours a day. He's an SDE 3. Sometimes he brings the laptop home if they're shipping soon or when he's on call. Otherwise, he rarely seems stressed or overworked.

10% Amazon discount. Pays the sales tax at least.

The internal For Sale list is pretty rad.

Lots of lunch restaurant options. Might seem silly but I am constantly jealous whenever I come by for lunch.

Cons:
Dogs. Dogs in meetings. Dogs having accidents on the floor. Dogs coming up to your desk and sniffing at your balls. Dogs whimpering at you when you're eating lunch. Dog hair on your pant legs. I love dogs but they so don't belong in a professional office.

Health care family plans a little pricey. Pretty cheap for just individual insurance though.

Tiny "door" desks, tiny cubicles, tiny meeting rooms. Offices can get pretty noisy. I wonder sometimes when I visit how anyone gets any work done.

Most groups have on call schedules or pagers. The smaller the group, the more you'll be on call. We've never had to say, leave a restaurant because of it, but there have been a few very late nights or canceled Sunday plans.

"Frugality": Not a lot of other perks that you might associate with a high tech company. Coffee is free, that's about it. Want two monitors or a better keyboard? Good luck. Want a Mac instead of a PC? Lolz! You'll have to justify every extra penny you want to spend.

Vacation time not generous. Only the bare bones for holidays (for example, you'll be working on Black Friday).

[RVD90277]

I came from the startup world where we regularly had to work weekends, late nights, etc. I was regularly working 70+ hours weeks.

At least for me, Amazon is nowhere in the same league regarding the amount of work that I had to do back then.

I think most teams have hours that start at around 9am or so and end by around 6pm. With a 1 hour lunch break, that's an 8 hour day / 40 hour work week. Of course if you're close to launching a product, you work work but that's the exception rather than the rule from what I have seen. Piece of cake.

As you move up, there are more conference calls and emails and things like that in the evenings and weekends though.

And yes, it depends heavily on your manager and team. A "bad" team is one where you are paged constantly because stuff keeps breaking, your manager isn't very good, and your org is in trouble. I haven't encountered a team like that yet but I'm sure one or more exist somewhere within the company...

RVD.

[calenti]

I'm in the same boat as you - have an offer and wondering if it's just a different boiler room.

What did you wind up doing?

Originally Posted by deleteno5

Does anyone know anyone that works for Amazon? I have an offer for a technical role on their AWS team and I've read HORRIBLE things on glassdoor.com regarding work/life balance and corporate culture. It was very common to see people talk about 10-12+ hour shifts every day, managers being demeaning to employees and not caring about them, basically treating them as disposable. What've you guys heard?

[west seattle gal]

Do electrical engineers work at Amazon (BSEE), and if so, what do they do, what is the title, are they also on call, and how much pay? Thanks!

[007jamesbond]

You guys are all making me think about the movie "Office Space". Lol.

[azoria]

I know a guy who is a recruiter for Amazon. Let's just say that he views his recruits as 'disposable'.

[LinePlaneVolume]

Originally Posted by azoria

I know a guy who is a recruiter for Amazon. Let's just say that he views his recruits as 'disposable'.

I wonder how many recruiters who work with any more than a handful of people don't think this...

[UrbanAdventurer]

Originally Posted by 007jamesbond

You guys are all making me think about the movie "Office Space". Lol.

The "my husband this, my husband that" stuff always cracks me up too.

[mikester007]

Originally Posted by calenti

I'm in the same boat as you - have an offer and wondering if it's just a different boiler room.

What did you wind up doing?

Depends on the team. Some - albeit rare - teams indeed put in 50, sometimes 60, hour weeks and get paged numerous times a week. Other teams, like mine, where nobody has needed to put in a night or weekend in years and gets paged maybe once or twice a year. Some orgs don't carry a pager at all.