The only place where senior managers who cause 100% attrition five times over can still get $2 million bonuses.
Pros
The starting salary is extremely competitive. The hiring pipeline is also extremely efficient, empowering Amazon.com to court and successfully hire some of the smartest professionals out there. Unfortunately, those are the only positive thing I can say about the workplace itself. Outside of work, when you aren't getting paged up the wazoo by legacy applications no one in the company has any idea about, life is awesome. Seattle is a beautiful city with plenty of culture and no lack of things to do. A nice side effect of working at a place with insanely high turnover and high starting salary is that you end up with tons of young professionals, all new to the same environment and in the same stage of their lives ~ if you're one of them, there are plenty of people to meet and hang out with.
Cons
Amazon does not value its employees and this severely affects every aspect of worklife. Employees are treated as replaceable, renewable resources, not as members of a working team to grow with the company. The focus is on new hiring with the expectation that any semi-intelligent employee will leave within the first two years. New hire salary is incremented at well over 2x the rate that top members of a team are given raises. New folks regularly make 5-10K more than their tech leads who are the highest contributors on the team, breeding poor sentiment. Promotions are easily promised during crunch times requiring 100-hr work weeks and just as easily forgotten when promotion or bonus time actually does come around. Additional responsibility, both in person and in project management, are regularly compounded upon top contributors without promoting individuals to the authority such a position requires, making it difficult to get things done in a culture where cross-team cooperation is like pulling teeth. In terms of quality of work, there is no value given to developer time and no emphasis on the importance of infrastructure. Build tools are down daily and ownership is a lost concept. Scapegoating is a regular occurrence when site-wide post-mortems require heads to roll. Few things are properly documented, rarely anything is QA'ed, and as all original product engineers tend to leave within two years, nearly everything is a legacy application. The product-development lifecycle emphasizes pushing new features/products out quickly, leaving little or no time for QA cycles. The same engineers who coded the features under crunch are sometimes asked to do QA sign-off. Yet when they come back to management with lists of blocking/non-blocking bugs, they are asked to hide the lists and just to provide the sign-off. The result ends up being shoddy services held up by a company of already-overworked engineers serving constant on-call rotations who know they will be paged, but even knowing this are rarely able to figure out how to even begin debugging the systems. When I joined, every single person on the previous generation of my team had left. I later discovered that this was a regular occurrence which had already happened for the third time. All the great projects and career opportunities I had been sold on before joining were back-burner items reserved for interns and other people they had yet to sell a permanent position to. Regular employees were delegated to continuous on-call rotations for applications no one knew anything about and left to debugging bugs hardcoded years before. The overwork, stress, and lack of self-fulfillment created quite the back-stabbing team. In my first week as a new hire, I was angrily told by my mentor "Every time I sit down to get something done, you ask me a question." Later the same day, I was told by my manager "So I've talked to the team and they say you never talk to them or make use of their expertise ~ you simply putter in a stuck corner when you could just ask." As my time there progressed, I regularly discussed the lack of opportunities and the disparity between my expected and actual roles with my manager, who always promised clear action items to address my concerns ~ none of which ever happened. When I found a new team where I thought I could make a greater impact, my manager blocked my transfer, going all the way through HR to accuse of poaching. When I tried to leave the company, my manager tried to delay my resignation. Good stuff.
