The Pay is Great, the Emotional Experience is Brutal
Pros
The pay and benefits are wonderful. There are some truly intelligent and kind people at the bottom and mid-level of leadership. Everyone is given space to invent and change and even new employees at the bottom of the org chart may speak up and disagree on a direction. At AWS/Amazon, your experience really seems to depend on what kind of Manager you get to work under.
Cons
There is a lack of empathy at the higher levels in Sales and Marketing. They're completely focused on shareholder value and manage costs at the expense of people. Level 8 and higher leverage libertarian, technocratic, nonsensical, pseudo-meritocratic, stack-ranking mixed with nonsensical jargon to justify holding people back from professional progress. Middle managers are unable to effectively coach or mentor their people at the individual level, as the more important metric is un-regrettable attrition (i.e. getting rid of X% of the employees per year). This latter point is not so dissimilar from most corporate/tech institutions right now, I suppose; however, the dispassion and ego of senior leadership leads to borderline inhumane methods of execution. It seems that one must be skilled at turning their personal empathy off on demand in order to thrive and rise in the ranks. Light-hearted people cannot effectively lead here.
