Customer Obsessed, Disposable Employees
Pros
You can learn a great deal about standing up AWS cloud based services, running various random agile dev methodologies, leading young teams of 5-8 devs and shipping software on a very fast basis. The systems for deploying services and the number of services deployed services are amazing. If you negotiate really hard on the way in, you can get almost $160K + a similar amount in monthly signing bonuses and/or stock grant for four years upon accepting. Just wait though, the catches to this Faustian bargain are baked into the culture -- it will get you.
Cons
Your odds of getting hired from an interview are about 1 in 10. Nobody ever gets more than $160K to start as that is the salary cap. While the year 1 and 2 signing bonuses can be nearly that much each, years three and four are entirely stock grants, while year five just base salary. The average tenure at Amazon is 12 months -- more than half do not make it to 1 year. Stack ranking (grading on the curve) guarantees purging of the ranks periodically. If you have a live service, you and your team are going to be on-call frequently and will have to carry a pager to you can provide day/night instant support. Most of the people in the South Lake Union offices are professional technical, and very annoyingly politically correct Seattleites with self-righteous liberal attitudes. Some parts of the company have HORRIBLE senior management that practices random public humiliation of attendees. Plus, you will likely be doing weeks long self-abasing "correction of error" documents anytime there is a problem with your software services. The Amazon Leadership principles generally seem like sound business practices, but make no mistake, you MUST drink the kool-aid and live every one of them or else. The employee culture is oppressive and soul crushing by design. Probably the worst part of Amazon culture is the unrelenting moral superiority of their practices. They actually believe they are "all that" in terms of software methodologies and that their rivals like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. know nothing about software and can teach them nothing of value -- it verges on insufferable, myopic arrogance.
