Pros
- Good compensation for the first few years, then you hit the "salary cliff". - Large-scale, distributed problems.
Kontras
- Internal tools are awful, and extremely specific to Amazon; you won't be learning things you can use at other jobs. General AWS knowledge isn't necessarily transferable because you'll be handling build/deployment/security/etc. in different ways. - A culture of endless nit-picking and bikeshedding (aka "law of triviality"); document reviews involve at least twice as many people as necessary, and the review-edit-repeat cycle goes on for 6-8 weeks even for obvious, necessary, simple ideas. - You need to climb over your peers to get promotions, and you need to be operating at the next level for years before a promo is considered. - Frequent re-orgs; after every re-org, you get to spent 4-6 weeks explaining your team's purpose and justifying its existence up the leadership chain, because the incoming managers have no idea what you do. - No raises, no additional RSU grants. - Baroque, out-of-date, and incredibly slow internal tooling. - Leadership has abandoned all pretense of following the famous Leadership Principals, but they're still used as weapons against individual contributors. - Customer Obsession means juicing the stock price at every opportunity, at the expense of employees and buyers on the retail site. - Every product is getting worse, being flooded with advertising and unwanted AI features.