Pros
- Great place to learn business - from one of the most successful companies in the world - Great place to learn operational best practices - Smart, driven coworkers (mostly) - Good practices on DEI compared to other companies i've worked at. - HR moves at glacial speed - Pre-pandemic was pretty fun, got to go to a Katy Perry/Lil Nas X concert that was a thank you to all the employees. - Culture of fear and PIPs and URA you read about on Blind was never true in my org. When folks got fired they really had to screw up.
Cons
- Internal tooling is painful to use and ugly to look at(SIM for ticketing, Chime for calls, CTI) but it does scale for 1m employees. - AWS Recruiting is poorly led and is difficult to hire SDEs because of shared SDE pipelines and competition among SDMs and rotating door of ever-changing recruiters. Never felt like a partnership between HMs and Recruiters. Makes it harder for me to hire as an SDM. - It is definitely not "Day 1" and they should embrace that. The culture of "mechanisms" and govt. auditing requirements and operational launch requirements prevents most teams from moving fast and innovating. By the time a team has already done that work , 3 competitors have launched and building out their customer bases. - People are kind of boring (or afraid of bringing their authentic selves). I asked my team what music they liked and several said Coldplay. Like Coldplay is fine and all, especially their older albums, but what a vanilla answer...