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Amazon Web Services

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Bizarre Place To Work - Program Manager Amazon Web Services Employee Review

1.0
31 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The place offers flexibility (depending on department) but thats really all that was offered, See Cons

Cons

The cons to this place are all small but it's a death by 1000 cuts. Each department is so walled off from another even though the work done is likely directly related to a neighboring department. Since each department is so walled off and autonomous this creates glaring gaps because work is managed so differently amongst different departments. An example is if a ticket for a password reset makes it to a support team, the team reviews it but since the teams are siloed the only thing the average agent knows is that this ticket does not belong with their team so the ticket gets moved to another team (the agent's best guess) and if they guess wrong the cycle repeats. This sort of thing becomes very obvious when you review AWS documentation. You will frequently find pages for new services that have either just launched or are close to launch and that page will reference another page for "more information" but the other page then references the first page as the place to go to get more information. I feel the worst for the new customers trying to work within various AWS programs. These are multibillion dollar customers being told something is launching next week and they ask AWS a question like "How do we check this on our bill" and the team running the launch tells these customers "We will get back to you when we know more". Every project is just an attempt at a promotion so that the individual being promoted can leave the department or leave AWS for something better. There is also a brutal work culture there where you find yourself with more work than can actually be done within the hours you have each week. This is by design. Now that Amazon's only KPI is stock price they prioritize laying off workers and they only send some generic email about it out to those of us who avoided being cut but the warning is clear, if you don't work yourself to death then you are next. The catch is you dont have time to look for other work because you're busy keeping your job. Amazon is definitely not what it once was and is now just playing catch up with other companies. The products and services are half baked and the primary argument made for decisions that no other business would make due to a variety of negative effects to customers, trust, company image, etc is the phrase "We can do it because we're Amazon". This company has begun to pride itself on being able to make less than wise choices and get away with it. I don't recommend working here.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
27 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great job. I’ve learned so much it is just hard with 5 day rto

Cons

The 5 day RTO mandate

4.0
12 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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