Pros: Decent pay and learning opportunities.

Cons: Top-down management hierarchy perpetuates a model of fear-driven results, and a focus on frugality creates an environment that is antithetical to creative work and promotes several toxic behaviors that are endemic to the company. AWS is structured in a way that is optimized for delivering web services, but this doesn't translate to other product initiatives that don't fall under that category, leading to subpar products where the end user is not an engineer. Similarly, Amazon as an entity is hyperfocused on margin-based revenue due to its start as a retailer, and this leads to poor decision-making for other markets that are not margin-based. Work-life balance was abysmal compared to other jobs, and other FAANG companies pay better.

Pros: A good place to start a career.

Cons: Management between manager and team is far from team to team.

Pros: Very well-established development pipelines, great for learning about product development cycles.

Cons: PIP culture and operational costs are significant burdens on SDEs.