Amazon recruiters may claim that their employees enjoy reasonable work/life balance, but don't believe a word of it! Amazon is a high-pressure environment designed to pile impossible demands on employees and get them to complete with their coworkers in order to squeeze out as much productivity as possible. You are just a disposable cog in the machine. Once you're burnt out, you're easily replaceable, and will be replaced by constant stream of new hires.... The whole system is designed to work that way. Expect to work 60-80 hours a week. If you move across the country to work for Amazon, expect to be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt in relocation repayment obligations, if you have any thoughts of quitting. The one good piece of news is that if you hold your ground and insist on maintaining good work/life balance, nobody will tell you that you have to work certain hours - you will just be put on a performance improvement plan and fired for "poor performance" - and then you will probably be offered a severance agreement where you are released from your repayment obligations.... Expect to be put through hell in the meantime though.
Oh, and as far as learning anything from your smart coworkers goes, don't count on it. Amazon has a deliberately culture Darwinian that encourages competition and discourages knowledge-sharing and collaboration.... Don't expect to receive any training to perform the functions of your job or any assistance from your coworkers, and expect most of your questions to be met with "go read the Wiki" - which by the way will probably be out of date, and was probably written by somebody who no longer works there - because Amazon has one of the highest employee turnover rates of any large, successful company. The entire time I was there I spent half of every day fighting a broken build system that could go wrong in any one of 100 different ways, all of which were listed on a Wiki with arcane instructions for resolving them – and every once in a while, it would break in some other way that wasn't listed.... Nobody bothered to put in the effort to fix any of this, because everyone was more focused on completing their own projects than on common infrastructure – and as far as management was concerned, who cares if developers have to work long hours to deal with this? They're smart - they can figure it out.
You might develop innovative solutions to difficult technical problems at Amazon, but you're equally likely to bang your head against the wall until you somehow manage to reinvent the wheel – perhaps in one of the least efficient ways possible, one which may be barely adequate.... Expect to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again, due to the lack of knowledge-sharing and brain drain from having so many people move on after barely working there for over a year. With so many people so poorly trained for the duties of their job, competing with each other instead of working together, making the kinds of bad design decisions that come from working at a death-march pace, it's amazing that anything works at Amazon at all.... The only reason it may work at all is the constant stream of new college hires. They do not offer nearly high enough pay to justify putting up with this (I was not making any more than at my previous position in a smaller, less expensive city). I was sorely disappointed after moving to Seattle for this. I not only learned twice as much, but also got twice as much done in half as much time at both my previous job and the next one after Amazon – all the while enjoying better work/life balance and a consistent 40-hour workweek.
Amazon is destroying the culture and fabric of Seattle, a city I used to like. Seattle used to be a laid back, counter-cultural city, with liberal attitudes but a cost of living much lower than San Francisco. Amazon is creating a housing crunch that has caused rents to spike to the point where they are almost not even affordable to tech workers and its antisocial attitudes are seeping into the general culture of city now. Ironically, the company I moved here to work for is destroying many of the things that drew me to move here in the first place.
