Working at Amazon is What You Make It
Pros
* Amazon always focuses on the customer first, and in doing such, you feel connected with the people that use your products. * Many of the products we work on are at the forefront of the industry, whether it be cloud services, retail, physical shopping, devices, etc. * There's always something new to learn and there is a mixture of all kinds of roles from more scientific and research based to hard core system optimization as well as solving new and interesting business problems, so whatever problems you like to solve, Amazon likely has something in that realm. * You are allowed to move between teams pretty much as often as you like. If you end up with a bad manager or unreasonable work pace, you can work with HR to find something more your speed. * Amazon compensates employees in stock, and the stock has been doing amazing the past 5 years. * Amazon is very flexible with dedicated and long-time employees. My wife got a job that required us to move across the country, and so I was able to start working from home (after 5 years at Amazon) while flying back to visit the main office in Seattle once a month or so. * The company operates as thousands of tiny little start ups. Each team has it's own set of goals and goes through rapid iterative development cycles, which makes for a fun environment. The advantage of being in a giant company like Amazon in this situation is that you can then leverage many of the tools and services that others have built and vend to you to make this even faster!
Cons
* Churn of people moving teams and in and out of company make it a little difficult to persist knowledge and keep full team momentum moving forward, but you can find teams that stick together for quite some time as well, it just depends. * Compensation is good compared to the software industry as a whole, but compared to other tech companies, it is slightly behind. Compensation is definitely substantial and had me very quickly walk away from a different employer I was not planning on leaving and keep me hear for 6+ years, so it's definitely still pretty good.
