Pros
- Good day to day job. Super smart colleagues, and interesting problems to solve. - Minimal (although not zero) office politics; very rare for an org of this size. - Compensation in general is decently high. Stock has been mostly a good investment for YOY growth. - Benefits have improved over time from terrible to average to good (still not great).
Cons
- Terrible place to try for a career; minimal support from leadership. Even if the desire is there, constant change/reorgs mean that your direct management won't be with you long enough to advocate for you, develop you, and collect enough data to justify your promotion. You constantly start over again through time. - Culturally, it is "what have you done for me lately?" High performance is rewarded with more RSUs...and then an expectation to do twice as much, twice as fast. Internally, it's a known saying that "Amazon is where high performers go to feel bad about themselves." - Burn-out is all but guaranteed for the vast majority of employees. This is a feature, not a bug -- hence why new hire packages are designed for a 4-year payout. They expect that on average, most employees burn out on either side of that timeline, so them taking their vested money and leaving is planned for.