Pros
Amazon will make stronger, tougher and more calloused in your professional life. If you can make it at Amazon, you can make it most other places.
Cons
Amazon is an awful place to work if you are not a good cultural fit. By cultural fit, you must be willing to back stab, be dishonest, work extraordinary hours and give up much of your personal life to this tribute to Jeff's sizable ego. Amazon used to be a great, cutting edge retail giant. Now, with one misstep after the next, the retail juggernaut is stumbling. Amazon is an incredibly siloed and disorganized company. It's not uncommon for three or for teams to be working on the same project and not know about the other teams until your work gets scrapped or even worse, you're told three quarters of the way that you need to now collaborate with other people. This is very common and a large reason amazon can't launch quality devices. Governance is unheard of at Amazon, and is a major contributor to the "slap on some duct tape and move on" mentality of the company. Amazon's internal systems are a joke...they are homegrown and piss-poor in quality. I was stunned when I started with amazon 4 years ago how behind the times Amazon is internally, In the same vein, amazon's annual review process is practically archaic and a bit heavy-handed. They force every manager to stack rank their people and force them in to a bell curve. People are ranked equally on individual work and feedback from peers. This leads to people torpedoing each other through anonymous feedback in an effort to stay on top. If you happen to fall in to the bottom of the bell curve, you are managed out of the company. I have been forced to do this, because we have to hit a distribution across the bell curve. I fought it, because it was the right thing to do. Compensation is then determined by how a person ranks against everyone else. This is the same annual review process that Microsoft made national news last year for abandoning because it was archaic, reduced overall moral, and made talent development and retention difficult. No one wants to work with the sword of Damocles constantly hanging over them. Compensation is another reason amazon is a joke. Much of your comp is tied up in restricted stock units RSU's that vest over several years. I was awarded 100 shares last review cycle 2014. I am not able to realize this for two years, because it doesn't start vesting until 2016. My RSU award was based on stock prices at the time ($360), but since stock tanked with yet another quarter of abysmal financials my award is worth much less. In fact, with this latest nosedive, I lost 17k this year in comp. Jeff loves to talk about how he doesn't pay attention to stock prices; he is focused on the long-term vision. That song and dance routine only works for so long with investors and employees. I care about stock prices, 1/3 of my comp is tied to the mercurial rise and fall of amazon stock. Overall, amazon is a supremely disjointed, disorganized corporate version of the hunger games. Please,think about this before you sign on...what is your integrity worth to you?
