Uninspired; cheap; broken DevOps; wildly inconsistent management
Pros
It's a tech job that pays you enough that you ought to have some disposable income. In good stock years, it can be somewhat better.
Cons
I worked on a service that grew very quickly and was extremely profitable. It was great for upper management, not particularly for worker bees. I had a couple of "good years" as I worked there during a period when my RSUs (stock units, treated as pay not options) appreciated about 300%, but the resulting total compensation was probably half what someone at another FAANG company would have experienced. Now to the salient points: * Uninspiring: If you are fortunate, you may spend a couple years doing something really exciting. Otherwise you are working in the digit mines. * Cheap: Amazon will put you to work on the 20th floor of a building and make you buy (full price) soda and (full price) snacks out of a machine. Your manager can get a snack budget for your team, but someone has to go to Costco to get the stuff. If there is a cafeteria, it's mediocre, and it's not cheap, either. Basically, Amazon would rather you take an hour and a half for lunch, or bring a sandwich to work, than feed you in the office. I'm not big on perks that replace what your mother used to do for you (e.g. laundry) but this policy is just stupid and wasteful. Still cheap: Amazon employs a ton of H-1B, and they are regularly held over the barrel, both with regard to working conditions, and pay. Broken DevOps: Much or Most of AWS has dispensed with the notions of QA and Operations. In the poorly run (but often extremely profitable) services, development runs open loop, with predictably unenjoyable results. In some services, this works out all right, ish. In others, especially when bug fixes never get into production because new features are more important to revenue, developers (who all have on call rotation) will experience brutal, and I mean absolutely brutal, on-call periods, with 20, 50, even 100 open tickets among teams of at most a handful of engineers. Most every engineer experiencing this mess is constantly looking for another job, either elsewhere in Amazon (moving to retail is popular) or elsewhere, period. Wildly inconsistent management: Your experience in your job will depend on your management. Period. If your good manager leaves, there is no guarantee or even expectation of continuity. Your rewarding job Friday may be a nightmare Monday although nothing at all other than a single manager changed. Remember the saying: "People join companies. They leave managers."
