Avoid it at all cost if you are not a workaholic
Pros
- You will be able to learn a lot here. There are many interesting problems to be solved and you can be owner of the project pretty quickly. - Seattle. While it gets really cloudy from September to April, it has really nice summer weather. Also, it does not snow much. - Flexible hours. You can come to office pretty late and leave late if you have to. - 401k, medical insurance. - Free coffee, tea, and hot cocoa. You can have as many as you want. - You can bring your dog to the office. You will be able to meet a lot of dogs here. - Decent base salary with stocks. Amazon gives you decent amount of salary.
Cons
- On-call rotation. You will have to carry a pager and be in an alert 24 hours because one of software that you manage can go down, and system needs a way to tell you about it. It is not fun for anyone to wake up 3am or 6am in the morning once in a week to solve the problem. This brings a lot of time to be spent on operation rather than developing your skill sets. - Bad work/life balance. Tight dead lines. On Thursday, some problem gets escalated and you need to solve it by next Monday, before your manager's meeting, which means you have to spend your weekend. This happens very frequently depending on your team. - Not so much room for salary increase. Amount of increase of your salary will probably the lowest in the industry unless you get promoted. If you are exceptional but did not get promoted, you will likely get about inflation rate (or lower) increase in salary. You will soon be able to find out that people who joined a year or two later than you getting higher salary with less skills. - Frugality. You don't get free food or perks. You will have to work everything on your single monitor and they will not accept your request to have multiple monitors. - This is just a minor thing but 780 square feet office with 11 developers and 2 managers isn't a good place to focus on your work. You will be able to hear a dog barking every other 10 minutes in the office next to you.
