Pros: Amazon is a cool place to work. Amazon prides itself on being obsessed with customer service and being data-driven. This clarifies the decision-making process for all employees at all levels and enables individuals to make decisions in the best interest of the customer. Amazon gives large responsibilities to all employees, regardless of tenure or role, in the hopes that the best ideas are driven forward.

Cons: The downside to Amazon's philosophy is the lack of consistent direction. There are many teams trying to build new things for their customers, and that leads to different agendas competing for resources. That, combined with the very high turnover rate, results in teams who are very inefficient due to having underdeveloped processes and inexperienced engineers. This all leads to an environment where you can get great V1 products out the door quickly, but those products often grow stale very quickly due to the fact that the team cannot maintain that initial momentum.

Pros: Very smart people. You will get to work with many high achievers from both the engineering and business worlds. Engineers get to learn a lot about business and see how high-achieving business managers function. Business managers get to work with and see how industry-leading engineering teams work.

Cons: Ridiculously hard to get promoted. You're more likely to see incompetent managers get hired into positions that they don't want to promote you to. Performance reviews and compensation systems are set up to allow the company to work you harder and pay you as little as they can get away with. Basically, you will only get a promotion or a decent raise when you work so hard that management runs out of excuses not to reward you properly. Very top-down management style. Every engineer's goals are the result of his or her manager's business goals, which are trickled down from the "S-team" – the top-level VPs of the company. Consequently, bottom and mid-level creative initiatives tend not to happen. Engineers have to deliver on project after project with overly aggressive deadlines, support a huge operational load (i.e., pagers going off in evenings and weekends), and are then held accountable for quality-related issues. Many teams have bloated mid-level managers who demand lots of meetings, bookkeeping, reporting, etc. TPMs and Dev Managers have to depend on tribal knowledge and personal networking to get anything done. Company emphasizes "Leadership Principles," which are the basis for how everyone ought to behave. However, they are vague and contradictory and only give the impression – to those who drink the Kool-aid – that the company appreciates hard work as well as results. In reality, they're no different from any other company that stack ranks its employees based on all sorts of subjective opinions. Reviews are full of BS and are mostly written after ratings have been determined. Eventually, the only engineers with rewarding careers at Amazon tend to be the fortunate ones whose managers know how to game the system, rather than play along with it. Everybody else eventually leaves, burned out and under-appreciated.

Pros: - Good work-life balance - Occasional free meals - Great team members - Nicely written code - Great pay

Cons: - Bad manager - Lots of technical issues - The structure is too rigid (leadership principles etc.)