Pros
Before my Day 1, I was slightly intimidated by some of the negative publicity that the Company receives due to its poor work-life balance, bureaucratic corporate culture, poor management, etc. While Amazon is a huge company, and therefore people’s experiences will vary significantly based on which org/team they are on, my personal experience has been nothing but extremely positive.
As an SDE at Amazon, you get to work with some of the nicest and most accomplished SDEs in the industry. I truly believe that the company provides an amazing opportunity for early-career SDEs to learn about the ins and outs of software development at an unparalleled quality, speed and scale. Within my first 2 months at the company, I got to develop and deploy my code changes affecting tens of millions of customers worldwide. There are not a lot of companies in the world where this would be even remotely possible.
As for the poor work-life balance criticism: while I have not gone on my first oncall shift yet, the day-to-day schedules of most SDEs are pretty normal. Obviously, managing a software product at Amazon’s scale and quality requires a higher level of commitment than working for many other companies would. In my opinion, the learning opportunity and the overall compensation more than make up for the occasional longer hours on the job.
If you want to advance your career, beef up your resume while receiving an extremely (SERIOUSLY!) competitive compensation package, I would definitely recommend joining Amazon.
