The fulfillment of the dreams of a madman
Pros
Challenge and career opportunity. If you need a harder challenge, they will give you one. The company moves fast and is very innovative. They know what it means to be creative. There is always room for people to learn and grow. Amazon is a career accelerator. It is a trial by fire, but you will come away being a far better employable individual than you were before you set foot in the door. Management is generally pretty good -- on an individual level at least. The company is also insane as a whole. They make very strange trade-offs, which somehow end up working out for them (as noted with the market valuation of the company). The people you work with are competent. Amazon has a very high interview bar, and it shows. You can trust that the person you're working with will do their job to the best of their ability, and they will challenge you in return. You gotta make sure you're up-to-date and on your toes, because anything that might be incorrect that you say or do will get challenged and brought to light.
Cons
Amazon.com, LLC treats its employees probably the worst of any "top-tier" tech company. The number of truly useful benefits they have is small. Their claim that the cash you're making makes up for the lack of benefits is incorrect -- other companies are now paying more with better benefits. You feel like the company doesn't care about you or your job. The attrition rate is so high that most teams lose about 50% of their talent every 2 years, so there's a lot of technical debt, and you risk finding yourself on a team whose only job is to clean up legacy code that nobody has touched since 2005 -- you don't get promoted that way, but someone has to do it. The company wants to put all its engineers on-call. If you're not on-call, you're working to become on-call. There is little-to-no ops layer, such that they restrict when you can take vacation during the Christmas holiday. They will page you whenever they decide they need you, including if you're on vacation. The likelihood that you'll get fed up with the company and decide to rage-quit after ~2 years is very high, don't plan on being at the company longer than that. If you're a pregnant mother or expect to become a mother -- forget it, don't even consider this company. They demand too much of your time, and they will make you feel like you have to choose between your job and your baby. Check the list of "top tech companies to work for" anytime from the beginning of time until now, you'll find that Amazon is rarely if never on that list, and there is a reason for it.
