Pros
Philosophy of focusing on the customer and they truly mean it. Many times we made decisions that were bad for the company short-term but better for the customer. Great to be guided by what's good for the customer. Strong sense of innovation - they try to do things in a new way and think big and ambitiously. You will have the opportunity to build interesting products and features. Stability - Jeff Bezos has a very long time-horizon and runs the company for the long term. Although the stock has traditionally gone up and down, the overall investment strategy is actually conservative. This company is unlikely to have anything that's a big hit that causes the stock to shoot through the roof, but you can count on fairly steady growth and I would not be surprised if the company is never forced to go through significant downsizing again. Size - The company is actually quite small. Don't be fooled by employee headcount numbers, most of those people are working in distribution centers and customer support. The actual meat of the company, the people building things, is small and fits in a couple buildings in Seattle. The product management leadership is a small group and it is easy to make an impact.
Cons
Amazon's culture is extremely top-down and micro-management oriented. You will not be able to make any important decisions about your product without management approval. Escalation to management is very common -- when you aren't doing what people want (or your work priorities don't fit what a peer wants you to do) employees will quickly give up on working it out between themselves and escalate directly to managers. You literally - I am not exaggerating - will receive customer complaint emails forwarded by Jeff Bezos and even if the issue is small you will have to dedicate disproportional time to it because it comes from the CEO. The micromanagement is absolutely stifling: Your boss will ask you to do something and then ask you again every day if it has been done yet. Your boss will ask to see your press release and will make word-for-word comments and suggestions over and over again until you realize you have been through 10 revisions and a half hour conversation about whether to use the word "user" or "customer". The culture has a sense of fun to it but it masks a disrespect for the people working for management. There is a clear assumption that management knows best in every way, and so they have to watch over every detail to ensure that the dumb workers do not screw something up. This will just suck your soul - there is no presumption that you know what you are doing because you earned the job there. If you do a good job you will be rewarded relatively handsomely, but the pay stinks until after you have proved yourself. Because the company is so small and growing slowly, career options are limited. There is little upward mobility because there are only a handful of senior managers, and there is limited options in the projects available. Would you like to run the DVD store or the Kitchen store or the Book store, etc. Working with Jeff Bezos is not on balance a good experience. He is very smart and you will learn from that but he is detail oriented to a fault. This is part of the reason managers are so anal. You may go into a design review with Jeff Bezos and be thrown off track immediately because you did not label the document in the way that he wanted. Then he will read the document and circle your grammar errors and harp on that and forget to comment on the design itself. Then he will be abusive and call you an idiot. Within the company, the implications of this micromanagement attitude are well known - the company consistently misses goals for retention of its best performing employees and I believe that is because smart and able people do not like having no freedom to make decisions or priorities and do not like being treated like they do not know what they are doing. This brings up the final drawback, which is that people are not as smart as at the best companies. They are certainly above the median, but if you get a taste of working with people at a company like Microsoft or Google you will see the difference. Nearly anybody at Microsoft or Google could get a job at Amazon but not the other way around. Summary: Amazon is a great company and will continue to be financially successful under Bezos' leadership. But it is not an enjoyable place to work. Buy the stock instead.
