SDE -- There are better places to work
Pros
It's the only big software company headquartered in Seattle. There is no commuting to the east side, and the vast majority of projects are based here, so there are a lot of interesting challenges. Big, gnarly projects where you can really stretch yourself, and if you find one that you are passionate about, and which doesn't get killed out from under you, it can be great.
Cons
It is very, very clear that employees are not valued -- Amazon burns through employees faster than any organization I have worked for, and puts little or no effort into retention. Work-life balance is something that the employee has to regularly put their foot down to enforce. High density seating means engineers in those areas are not going to get stuff done. It's stupid, not frugal. Legacy projects are left running in production long after everyone who has worked on them has left the company, with some unfortunate saps having to prop them back up every time they get paged, but without the authority to fix them so they are stable, since the next big thing is way too important. Maintenance tasks are not rewarded. The product definition for the next big thing will change incessantly until it is finally launched long after it was promised, and after a long death march, during which several key people will have quit in disgust, and a few more will have been reassigned to another project that they had no interest in, but which had a lot of people quit in disgust. Don't worry though, that just means more work for everyone else, and a shorter on call rotation. And a lot of time interviewing people to try to replace the people who left. Managers routinely lie to higher ups about the status of projects, so it becomes a crisis when someone finally notices things aren't going to be delivered on time. Infrastructure and build tools are poorly maintained -- the teams are perpetually understaffed, like the rest of the company, and it results in productivity losses across the company, greater than the cost of just fully staffing those teams. Between poor project management, poor product design, operational burden from slowly collapsing systems and poor development tools, so much time is wasted that it would be funny if you didn't care. Compensation is ok, mostly. There is no gift-matching, which surprised me until I realized that Amazon has never donated anything to the community. There are countless little stingy things that come under the name of frugal, but which are just demoralizingly stupid. Employee reviews are a sad joke. Also, stack ranking encourages some teams to deliberately hire a few unqualified people as self-protection.
