Pros
I spent 10 years at Amazon starting from engineer to growing into senior manager. I did software development, program management, product management and even some online marketing. If you get opportunity to get into ground floor of a new initiative or business and are lucky enough that the initiative has executive attention and becomes a business and starts growing it will do wonders for you: 1/ You will learn first hand how businesses develop in online world 2/ You will learn how to operate efficiently (very limited resources - people and funding, and many idea - makes decision making and product pivoting crucial) 3/ Your career will grow fast within the company I have outlined idea scenario that does occur in parts of the company. Albeit to lesser and lesser degree as company has grown a lot and become somewhat of a different beast. So if you are looking at the company and are serious about your investment of years there - be very sensitive to group you go to. You can land at a group that is bigger and older but if so, perform as well as you can and then you must switch to smaller - new business starting group. Otherwise you will be one of many who often complain about the company: - Only ops, hardly get to write lot of code or ground breaking software, too much internal tribal knowledge - Burnout - big group - crazy boss driven beaurocracy Lastly, Amazon is place for those who persevere in times of troubles - keep that in mind!
Cons
- Work life balance was worst in my first 4-5 years, it got a lot better in last 2-3 - If you are in big group, you will find it hard to get much done - big systems with amazon scale of customers are slow sorry - thats life - If you are in group with systems not yet mature for the scale, you will end up with lot more operations (debugging, finding that bug involving hairy exception stacks, being smart about problem solving beyond just looking at code flow)