Pros
- Total compensation (salary + signing bonus + RSUs) is good - Smart, talented colleagues - Lots of resources for researchers in terms of templates and others who have done whatever you want to do - Having Amazon on your resume might look good, if you can last long enough
Cons
- Benefits are substandard, particularly time off. - It seems purposefully confusing to figure out how much vacation hours you've accrued or will have by a certain date, making it difficult to take time off, particularly your first year when you haven't accrued many vacation hours. - They have 401K matching, but you don't get to keep the matching amount until 3 years at Amazon. - The workload is overwhelming and untenable, making a positive work/life balance nearly impossible. It's a continuous cycle of burnout and insufficient recovery. - Your experience may vary somewhat by manager and service team, but even a good manager and team hardly make up for how soul-crushing it is to work at Amazon. - Amazon is a big company with a lot of resources, but you have to find and make use of those resources on your own and somehow magically find the time to find and learn how to apply them. - Amazon operates more like a conglomerate of small, siloed start-ups than a well-coordinated organization. - The leadership principles are taken seriously. You'll be interviewed and evaluated based on them, and people constantly refer to them. That's not necessarily bad in itself, but they are often used to enable managers to shirk responsibility and pile more work onto individual contributors. For instance, the "Ownership" principle says you should never say "that's not my job." So, you'll be asked to do things beyond the scope of the role you were hired for, or 'take ownership' for so many things that you'll be overwhelmed with tasks. - Cloud computing is pretty boring for most people. - Training is not something that's routinely offered to employees. You have to justify the need for some specific type of external training. So there's little opportunity for you to learn things that would help you in your career outside of AWS or Amazon's "peculiar" way of doing things.
