Pros: Part of something big and generally good - Amazon is truly a customer-focused company that has brought some real value to the marketplace. Ability to have large-scale impact in your work: stuff I've worked on has been deployed on hundreds of machines and handled $100 MM+ in business. Colleagues are smart, pragmatic, and get things done. The colleagues here are some of the best that I've worked with in nearly 10 years in the industry.

Cons: Operational overhead - If you're lucky, you will be on a newer team without much operational overhead. Most likely, you'll be spending a significant portion of your time dealing with operational issues (pages, data backfills, investigating production alarms, resolving issues with other teams, etc.). Work-life balance is hard to maintain. Very little professional development - Aside from internal speaker sessions, there are few opportunities for professional growth and development. Email - I have grown to despise Outlook more than ever before. How can people read this much email? Development process - Some teams do Agile; some operate in a chaotic code-and-fix mode. There's little support for best practices across the company. If you are coming from outside and have done some reading or practice in software engineering processes, this place will feel like a gigantic step backwards. HR - There is essentially no human resources department in this company. For almost all questions, you'll be talking to an email alias. Ridiculous upper management escalations - Seriously, do you need to critique form layouts when they've been designed by a UI expert? And your background is in what, again? Internal build tools and frameworks - Outdated, can be frustrating, little documentation.

Pros: 1. Dynamic working culture for you to succeed: It's my first month here at Amazon, and this is what I can foresee if I execute as a humble leader. 2. Worry-free first month of onboarding experience: Other than the famous, well-known Leadership Principles in mind, onboarding activities include many courses and execution experiments. At least in the team or org that I stayed, I don't need to worry about making a contribution at all during this period of time. It allows me to observe what the team does and how the team does things. Also, many courses are very useful to help any SDE become an excellent engineer. It's a great process to help any new member get ready and start their journey well. 3. Very strong, competitive salary pay, this is why I switched from Microsoft to Amazon. 4. Teammates are all very humble and love to help. Everyone here can be considered a leader, and they are eager to share their knowledge and experience to make you successful as well. I don't find any PIP or competing interests at all. 5. The culture and working environment expect you to be a leader of your own and make a contribution to the team, the org, or even broader impact. I would recommend someone who knows what he/she wants or is self-motivated enough to join. Otherwise, you might get lost since no one would push you to do anything, which might end up in a loop of failure. To be continued: It's just my first month, and I would expect more findings as I expand my network and contributions. Would love to share more when possible.

Cons: 1. Leader of yourself: It's easy to say but hard to execute. This requires some foundation and experience so you won't get lost. Everyone is very busy, and managers are not mentors, so self-motivation is very, very important. Often without a good mentor, you will waste a lot of time finding out what you do and how you do it. 2. Coding convention: I don't find this as a requirement in our team's development yet, so if you don't have a good coding habit, you would miss the learning opportunities to code collaboratively. This is an important habit in most other software companies. 3. Documentation wiki or resources: There are very many internal resources and shared folder-style documents, but not as easy as Microsoft, which might be because I am new. But I would expect a much better user interface, so far at least.

Pros: Working on AWS as a Software Development Engineer has given me the tools to understand the complexity of running and supporting a cloud service. These tools have made me a better professional: my available resources are abundant, and there's still room for improvement.

Cons: The operational burden is huge. Some teams have very rigid roadmaps. Sometimes features are prioritized instead of fixing underlying architectural problems.