My internship at Amazon in Luxembourg just finished. During my interview preparation I searched around for information about the Luxembourg office but couldn’t really find anything. I’ll try to write down everything I have observed during my short stay of four months. Note that all opinions are my own and big companies vary wildly between orgs and teams so your mileage may vary.
Office and Perks
Let’s start with whats most easy to observe, the office. Even though most managers I’ve had contact with were totally ok with working from home, I’d encourage any intern to spend as much time in the office as possible! You will be able to socialize with other people in the office and generally learn more about how work is like in the company.
As mentioned above, my internship was in Luxembourg (city) the capital of Luxembourg, a small nation bordering Germany, France and Belgium. Luxembourg (city) is rather small with very international residents (over 50% of people come from abroad). Most people there speak French, but English works well, as well as the native language Luxembourgish which has similarities to German. I enjoyed the city but personally four months were enough for me. I felt like after that time I have seen most of Luxembourg and there wasn’t much left to discover. Luckily Luxembourg is placed right in the center of Europe so traveling was definitely an option especially for quick weekend trips to say Amsterdam or Brussels.
The office itself is placed in the business district Kirchberg. It’s right next to the KPMG building and other big banks headquarters. The office building my team was in (Lux 18) was your run of the mill corporate office. Each floor had an open space plan (ew), a kitchen and plenty of meeting rooms. As expected with Amazon there were almost no office perks. There were free fruits in the receptions and we got lunch vouchers worth around 9 euro for each working day. The intern salary was quite hefty, so I was easily able to afford going to restaurants during lunch breaks, as well as any outside activities I desired. One thing to note: The coffee in this particular Amazon office may have been the worst coffee I drank in my life, I don’t know how they did it but they failed at this one basic thing every developer needs.
The people
I got quite lucky with my team, the people were very nice and welcoming. I had a lot to learn from them, my team was full of experienced and knowledgeable engineers! The floor was filled with internationals from all over the world (not just Europe) though the interns were mostly from Europe. This created an atmosphere of open mindedness and led to many interesting conversations. I made many friends in the office and also traveled with them during my internship. Many of those friends will remain even after the internship ends, it was definitely an unforgettable experience! It kind of reminded me of Erasmus in this regard.
One thing I noticed during my short stay, and something that should not surprise you at such a big company: Politics plays quite a big role at Amazon, and it is very important that your manager likes you. I have seen people quit after they got really bad work assigned to them for months while others got promoted quite quickly getting very impactful work. The main difference I observed: Their manager liked them.
The project
At Amazon interns get a project assigned to them that they are supposed to deliver by the end of their internship. Those projects are not just toy projects but are supposed to go into production. So even as an intern you already get real responsibility. Quality and impact of those projects can vary quite a lot tho. Some interns I talked to (including the previous intern at my team) got projects that were very important to the team and got good guidance. I personally got a bit unlucky, the person who was supposed to create and supervise my project got switched right before my internship. Because of that my project had low impact overall and was barely thought out. So the beginning of my internship was mostly gathering requirements and just coming up with some concrete goals of my project. As my project modified a system that was not in production yet, I could never see the impact of my work. In general I would say my particular internship project was not that great but I got quite unlucky as most of the interns I talked to had much different experiences. The tech stack in my team was fun, everything was written in native AWS, something I was quite excited to learn about.
Conclusion
Overall I would definitely recommend an internship in the Amazon office. I made many great friendships that will remain even after I have left. Personally I would not return to Luxembourg if the Chance was given, as the city was just too small for my personal taste. It is quite easy to use the return offer from the Luxembourg office and just return to another office that is more suitable for you tho, I talked to hiring managers in both Berlin and London and the process of moving teams seemed quite easy and comfortable.