Your mileage may vary, it's not for everyone
Pros
About 90% of the people (individual contributors and managers) are absolutely brilliant. Super smart people who care about what they do and want their teams to succeed. I'm motivated to work hard, and honestly, enjoy doing it, and it's not just me. There's a lot of people I enjoy working with who seem to feel the same way. My current manager is fantastic, cares about my career growth and my team. Our 1-1s are meaningful. I don't always get what I want but I always walk away better understanding why. The technology is really cool. I get exposure through tech talks, demos, just walking around the manufacturing and test floor to lots of cutting edge stuff even when I don't work on it directly. I think there's a personality type that does very well here, I am definitely in that category. You may be too if you get that rush of seeing things work can run a long time on seeing an actual freaking robotic system come to life because of their work. I am definitely one of them. Headcount expansion and turnover have been pretty high recently so if you get past 2 years, you have pretty good job security just because you end up in the top 25% by seniority and your newer peers / management chain can't afford to lose your experience. We're also paid a decent chunk in RSUs (AMZN stock), which put my salary well above what I can get anywhere else for a while since it went up over 50% in value since I started. Of course, when my original vest runs out this starts to drop... Otherwise the health benefits are decent. There's shuttles to Alewife, South Station, and
Cons
Like I said, it's a specific personality type that fits in well here. If you just want a steady 9-5, go home, walk the dog, feed the kids type job, this is not it. A lot of people burn out because almost no one will ever tell you when you've done more than enough. There's definitely plenty of that relentless Amazon do-more culture at AR. The 10% of individual contributors who are awful can generally be worked around. But if you get unlucky and get the 10% of management who are awful, your life can be hell, which I also lived through. Senior leadership pays lip service to employee concerns and dealing with bad managers because 1) employee relations is hard and 2) they have to fight their own political turf wars. There's also a lot of middle-aged men going through mid-life crises who make it our problem. Speaking of which, if you end up caring too much about your work (which you tend to do if you fit in), the politics can be very draining. Some of that awful 10% are definitely high functioning sociopaths and egotistical blowhards who optimize for their own visibility. They love asking "gotcha" questions and pushing their own asinine ideas to show how smart they are. Amazon claims to be "data-driven" but you would be surprised how many ways nonsense can be construed as data. There's also the control freaks, the incompetent managers who fail up, and so forth, but that's not really exceptional -- except recently there's a few in strategically important positions to maximize misery for their reports. Probably part of the high turn-over in the last year.
