Amazon is an incredibly toxic place to work. It is very bureaucratic and top-down heavy. Leadership will just do empire building and doesn't even care about our customers nor Amazon's Leadership Principles. SDEs are treated as cogs and pawns. Constant reorgs throw people under buses unnecessarily, and higher-level managers will pull some BS excuse or use some LP to justify their empire building and chaotic, constantly-half-baked initiatives. Amazon is also very frugal -- no free food. They really make you work. You won't even get Christmas Eve off unless you are in a state that mandates it. You also only get 10 PTO days for your first year. At least management is very flexible when it comes to choosing days off, and you probably won't get any pushback. Oncall is a horrible mess. Your team will own dozens of legacy services that have poor documentation and were built with duct tape. All the tribal knowledge on how the systems work will have been lost due to the ridiculous churn Amazon has. This is basically my experience on my team. Only recently is has turnover/being short-staffed gotten better because nobody has anywhere else to go. Teammates will be too busy or angry to help you. You'll also end up being one of those people with a million things on your plate and not enough time to help anyone Not all orgs are complete dumpster fires, but there is some serious corruption going on that I don't even think the upper leadership knows about (or maybe they enable it).
