Pros
As a company, in many ways, Amazon is quite amazing. They've had success in multiple verticals and are continuously expanding into others. If you're working in one of those new verticals, it's exciting to see what will come out of it. People are getting more excited about Amazon because they are taking bigger swings (Whole Foods, online pharmacy, Twitch, etc.) from which they have a compelling foundation to build off of (e-commerce) which is different than other big tech companies. The stock has been soaring and general sentiment of financial analysts have been good. The company is continually expanding within Seattle, is opening a second HQ, and continues to grow internationally. Overall, there's always a feeling while working at Amazon that something crazy new or exciting is happening somewhere.
Cons
People, teams, and organizations work in silos. This is common at large companies, but the degree in which it happens at Amazon is extreme. I can count numerous examples from the different teams I've been on and worked together with in which people on the same team are completely unaware of what each other were doing. The worst example of this was two different product managers on the same team getting two different sets of engineers to accomplish the same exact large scale task. This is so engrained into the Amazon culture, that people will see situations like this, laugh it off, and accept it as normal. Many people still save design source files and Word/Excel documents to their computer and share them out via email if you know to ask. To compound this problem, Amazon is so freaking cheap that they give all employees 1 GB of email storage, which is less than basically every free email service provider in the world. Cloud-based and collaborative work processes are still foreign concepts to many in Amazon. Engineering is clearly more powerful than product and design, and a lot of time on both product and design teams are wasted because engineering has final says on almost everything. A lot of the existing internal tools and infrastructure at Amazon are created and designed by engineers without the end user in mind. This has been normal at Amazon for over 20 years and isn’t changing without some kind of high-level intervention. Because of that, the only teams with decent design teams and designs are in the most successful consumer facing products: the e-commerce site, devices/Lab126, Amazon Video, and Amazon Music. Don’t even bother joining other design teams if you care about making good designs. Amazon's strength is e-commerce, so they have a poor foundation for serving up digital services (communication, social, productivity, etc.) like the ones Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. have. Many digital services and products that aren't tied to the e-commerce site are inferior in engineering, product, and design. The quality of life at Amazon is poor compared to other companies you can work at. I haven’t seen instances as bad as the New York Times article where people are crying at their desks or screaming at each other, but there are definitely many people who are grumpy or frustrated. You are expected to bootstrap and be self-reliant. It really comes across as an excuse to do the bare minimum to support employees. Company training for new employees is half a day long, and then it all depends on what your organization and team have set up for you. If they set nothing up for you, well... you’re on your own. This would be more acceptable if more IT, support, and security staff were more helpful. Many (not all) are disgruntled with a poor attitude. However these employees are also just given the bare minimum to accomplish their jobs, so they have some right to be moody. The bootstrapping mindset, the lack of resources and support, the focus on doing more with less, and the overabundance of work has led to a culture where people don’t actively help or collaborate with one another because they have too much to deal with. Some people are genuinely nice and want to be helpful and collaborative, but they can’t because they’re too busy. Then you’re left with the jerks who don’t want to be either and don't care if they set up giant roadblocks in your way to get anything done. The leadership principles are celebrated by employees, but are easy to be interpreted in multiple conflicting ways, like any other cult or religion. What is deemed "right" usage of leadership principles is mostly from those most charismatic, most experienced, or most masculine. Most of Amazon's leadership posts are held by men who've been at Amazon long, so the leadership principles skew heavily toward masculine values and mindsets. Uber’s former cultural values and former CEO were heavily influenced by Amazon’s, and you can see where that got them. The frugality leadership principle gets ridiculous to a point where they will save a couple bucks, even if it means giving employees more headaches. An easy example of this is not stocking certain cables with IT or even basic supplies in the office supply rooms. Sure you might save dollars on not buying them, but if your designer, product manager, or engineer need to leave the office to buy some, you’re actually losing money. Oh and that dumb 1 GB of email storage. IT tells you to essentially adopt an OCD email management approach in order to fit into the 1 GB limit. Are you freaking kidding me?