If you are not interested in being a drone, don't become a programmer at Amazon
Pros
Salaries, stock, and signing bonuses are pretty good. They do wave a lot of stock in front of you in the form of RSUs which vest in like 4 or 5 years. What they don't tell you is that hardly anyone lasts that long.
Cons
First of all Amazon is like many different companies rolled into one. What your work life is like depends entirely and absolutely on specifically which group and project you get hired into. You can be in a hell-on-earth type engineering position and be one office away from somebody working their dream job depending on the project you are working on. So take positive as well as negative reviews here of the place with a grain of salt. That said, this is a negative review. Generally Amazon is incredibly political with layers of management and various warring factions within the layers. You can easily end up in some project that exists in contested ground leading to a situation in which your contribution will come under undue scrutiny from various actors. The management of the place seems to revel in this kind of culture; they seem to want it to be this way. If you are the typical introverted programmer type who is bad at the social aspect of life, prepare to be somebody's pawn or to be stabbed in the back. You can just ignore the politics but the politics will not ignore you. There are reorgs constantly; one never knows where one stands. One's boss changes frequently. On-call a week out of a month is the norm, sometimes it is the more. You will be expected to work long hours pretty much always. When I was hired I was told our group would never be put on-call we were after a month. My boss changed after a month to my boss's boss who was literally a sociopath. After a while another programmer in my group managed to engineer basically a coup and got sociopath guy fired but by that time it was too late for me. I was burnt out. the whole dynamic of software development there is about hiring young people who haven't had a lot of prior job experience and burning them out. I was not young,I had been around the block software job-wise and I thought I could just stick it out for the carrot on the stick but, basically, I couldn't do it. At a certain point I just wanted my life back.
