Pros: Smart people, fantastic builder tools, fantastic hardware, dogs at work, SLU is great. Great flexibility in terms of hours, working from home, personal time, etc.

Cons: Tiny cog in a big machine, sink or swim culture, tons of attrition, corporate atmosphere, 'frugality' in terms of perks and benefits.

Pros: For some reason, many other companies see working at Amazon as something admirable, so you can leave Amazon for a better company pretty easily.

Cons: For the average Amazon employee: * The hiring bar is per-team, so there are some really low-skill, toxic people floating around Amazon, intermixed with some (less often) very high skill teams. Because of this, the average employee will have to work with unskilled engineers with bad attitudes and bad coding skills, and will pick up some of these bad habits. * Management is non-engineer, so they often make big technical decisions without understanding them. Some will just listen to the loudest voices on the team, others will actively make their own bad decisions. As an average employee, expect that you will not get to make team decisions, or you may have to fight for it. It's not a good place for shy people or non-aggressive people. * There's no diversity. Even for a tech company, there's very little diversity. They pad their company numbers by hiring tons of women and minorities for non-engineer roles, but as an engineer, expect to work exclusively with white, Indian, and Asian men. In my personal experience, not sure if this is average: * two (of 6) of my teammates were actively sexist and complained all the time whenever a woman on the sales team would talk in a room nearby, opening and closing their hands in a yapping motion. * My entire team called me "a hippy" often and said I probably "smoke a lot of weed" because of my long hair. I have never smoked. * My coworkers modified their Nerf guns such that it really hurt when the darts hit you. They'd aim for the face and laugh when it hit people in the eye. * My boss actively tried to fire me when I disagreed with his design decision, only to find he couldn't. Six months later, after it turned out I was right, he tried again, claiming I was actively sabotaging the production system. Before that, he lied on my performance review and claimed I wasn't performing well because I have "A.D.D." This boss was later promoted after I left. The list goes on, but suffice to say this was the worst work experience of my life, and I will never go back.

Pros: Compensation is cool. Good joining bonus and stock options (but they are distributed over a substantial period of time as part of employee retention). Great learning about various latest technologies, scalability factors, immediate impact, etc.

Cons: Bad employee satisfaction. No one cares about employee workspace or perks (like shuttle, food, or sports memberships, etc.).