Avoid Amazon and save yourself 12+ hours each day
Pros
1. Smart people overall 2. Reasonable pay if you ignore the fact that you work 12+ hours a day (sometimes even more than that).
Cons
1. No work-life balance - I've worked 12+ hours each day in Amazon. There were a couple of months that I even worked for 14-16 hours a day + weekends. 2. No growth opportunities. 3. Poor benefits compared to other top tier companies. 4. Managers aren’t in Amazon are not to be trusted – Your manager will tell you anything to make you join his team and make you work harder. But from my experience managers in Amazon aren’t on your side. For example: During my 1.5 years in Amazon I had 5 managers (yes, 5!). The first manager was the one that recruited me. Back then Amazon gave me an SDE 2 offer although I was a senior in some other leading company. That manager together with his director, told me not to worry. They told me that Amazon give sde 2 to almost everyone, but then they promote senior people after 6-12 months. Shortly after I joined Amazon I discovered that there was no truth in these claims (even if you ranked high as I did there was absolutely no chance for that to happen). In fact, 3 months after I joined my first manager already left so that promise faded into the air. 5. Unbelievable amount of politics - As I described managers in Amazon aren’t to be trusted. They are all about slaving their employees so they can move up the ladder faster. After a year in Amazon I came to my 5 (and last manager) and asked him about the promised promotion. My last manager told me that in Amazon, if you want to get promoted, you need to “play the politics”. You need to find ~6 engineers to support you. Later on the same manager told me in one of our 1-1s that in order to get his support for my promotion, I need to kill one of my side project and give it to him so he can present it as his own initiative. There is also a lot of politics on the peers level (which I won't describe here). 6. Lack of diversity – yes, unfortunately that also exist in Amazon. My division had a clear preference for engineers that came from a certain country. All of the managers and senior engineers in our division came from that country. I personally didn’t think it’s a coincidence. 7. Pay is only reasonable if you ignore the fact that you work 12+ hours a day. In fact, strong engineers can find way better offers at every other leading company pretty much.
