"Soul-Sucking" is Seattle cliche describing Amazon for a reason
Pros
You will be well paid and rewarded with a lot of stock that could be very valuable if you stay 4 years. If this is your first job out of college and you are willing to work 60-80hrs to week, you will get something out of it.
Cons
The culture is terrible, and I personally experienced some of the backstabbing reported by the NYT years later. (The company has not learned.) More broadly, people there are so busy and so low on EQ, it is not a pleasant place to work. The work is mind numbingly abusive. The caliber of projects I was given were on the level of things I did 5 or 10 years ago, and the volume of work was 2-3x what is reasonable if you don't want someone to work until 11pm every night. If you have any level of senior management experience, do not expect to develop and evolve your skill set; expect to be taken advantage of via over-work on basic projects. They don't offer any management training or understand what good mid-level management looks like. Whether you want to develop as a manager or be managed well, odds are stacked against you. I've never seen so many bad managers in one company. Beware the smoke and mirrors. There is an extraordinary PR narrative around the company due to it's stock price and Bezos' wealth. Behind the curtain, the company is not as good at data as it pretends to be, and their "customer obsession" is a thinly veiled metaphor for profit-seeking. (They do not understand or value real customer insights nor do they have they evolved much beyond their 1990's playbook of how personalization should work.) All the innovation is also top-down, often from people who have been at Amazon so long, they are out of touch. It's uninspiring. Myself and countless others I have talked to that are either current of former employees have all noted working for Amazon turns them into someone they don't like. We/They are overworked and/or under-engaged, and they become angry, snap at their spouse/kids, and forget what it is like to work in a state of flow v. a state of fear.
