Pros: This is specifically for the Alexa Shopping org. Amazon is a great company. The peculiar culture is amazing. Alexa Shopping is a great place if you want to work for Amazon, experience retail, and not be in the heat of Alexa or AWS. People do get promoted here, but the culture might not be enjoyable for everyone. The team is growing exponentially.

Cons: This is specifically for the Alexa Shopping org. Amazon is a great company. The peculiar culture is amazing, but Alexa Shopping is not. This org is very top-down. Those in top positions make all the decisions. There is a bunch of leadership who have been working together on previous ventures that failed at Amazon, and they constitute the elite group of people who can make decisions at Alexa Shopping. Product Managers control the organization; Developers don't matter. Decisions are made without any technical input from the engineers. Management wants two-week features, which is very hard to do when you are building something so novel and new from the ground up. Also, any good project that will take longer than two weeks gets discarded, even if it has huge long-term potential. Basically, leadership is so focused on short-term growth and short-term numbers. We incentivize people to shop by giving away "free money," not by making our experience great. This is why Alexa Shopping will never be inspiring or successful. Too much politics for promotions. There is an oligarchy of L6+ (Sr. Devs and above) that keep to themselves to discuss "big ideas." They spend weeks arguing, and they never make any decisions or move forward with anything. Also, everyone complicates things in order to get promoted. And devs are scared of change or trying new things. When you join, you are promised that you will work on Alexa + Natural Language/Machine Learning. The truth is we do very little of that. All we do is do little integrations with retail systems (checkout, order history, search). The work is not that interesting from a technical side, even though it's all new code.

Pros: Exciting, changeling environment with problems that push you to enrich skills both within your field and in surrounding functions.

Cons: Can be slightly too demanding at times, but never overwhelmingly.

Pros: Amazon is a large company with a lot of great technologies. If you want to work in a specific technological field, odds are Amazon has a team that fits you. If you are new to development (recent college graduate), there is a decent learning curve, but lots of tools to help you out. A large community of developers are also available to help you ramp up to be more confident with the immense number of tools Amazon leaves at your disposal. After a year or so, you will have developed skills in tons of useful technologies and be much more confident in your engineering skills.

Cons: You are an employee of Amazon; you are not its friend. It does not cherish you. It does not make sure you are comfortable. It does not hold your hand. It will do exactly what is necessary to make sure you think twice before leaving and nothing more. You want holiday vacation? Amazon will give you exactly what is federally required (6 holidays per year). You happen to be on-call (respond to events 24/7) for that holiday? Too bad. You don't get a bonus and you don't get it back. You want a raise? Amazon will be as shrewd as possible to make sure it doesn't have to pay you any more than necessary. You want company perks? Hah! How about 10% off the first $1000 you spend at Amazon? Amazon wants its money first. After working at Amazon for a good chunk of time, I can confidently say that these are my main complaints: * I am just a money-maker for them. No feeling of loyalty. * On-call is brutal and no extra compensation is given. * Minimal perks, benefits, etc.