Pros
Challenging problem space, some execs are not complete morons.
Cons
The most annoying part of working at Amazon is how people don't matter at all in this company. You are a number. No one will give a damn about training you, growing you, advancing you. What you do is completely irrelevant. You will be passed over by the cronies of your newly hired director or VP (mistresses, drinking buddies, soccer team mates, etc.). Reviews and interviews are passive-aggressive-driven beauty contests: for your success it is much more important to be "nice" with everyone and not rub anyone the wrong way rather than actually getting something done. Management is all hired from outside, almost never promoted from inside. The attrition is ridiculous also because of that. The pay and the benefits are such that those able to, leave amazon as soon as the all-cash compensation period is over, especially with a stagnant or declining stock. Those who stick around, tend to be those that cannot go anywhere else, and it shows. In my career I have never seen so many incompetent morons with the title of director or higher, spending all their time and energy trying to defend their position rather than get work done. In two years I had the team produce 100x more lines of useless planning documents that no one read or cared about than actual code. The few great people I have worked with were all in the intermediate to low levels and were all leaving or looking around. The technology stacks I have worked on were all put together with tape and wire. More than 90% of the resources were spent trying to get the stratified hacks of ten years to keep working rather than creating something new (and it was a mission critical system). The technical leadership is the division was non-existing. There may be some pocket of excellence elsewhere in the company, but after I have seen the shambles the supposed core business is in, I ran for the door at the first opportunity.
