Pros: Amazon is a well-known and well-liked company. They actually do care about customers and take customer trust and experience very seriously. Different groups and teams are reasonably decoupled, allowing a lot more independence. If you're the sort of person that likes to work on lots of different bits of software and constantly jump from fire to fire, it's definitely a better fit than someone who prefers quality. Amazon also copes very well with the high level of turnover by making sure that exposing a lot of people to a lot of things keeps employees fungible.

Cons: Amazon makes no effort to attract high-quality people (in fact, they do quite the opposite with their self-claimed 'frugal' -- absolutely-no-benefits policies). When Amazon tells you about 'Work Hard', what they mean is that they make work hard. Like all the stuff you're expecting: a powerful developer machine or a second monitor, are things Amazon has a policy against (although, as they will tell you, you're allowed to buy and bring in your own stuff like RAM, SSDs, and extra monitors... lucky you!). And what about Admin access on your developer laptop? LOL no, that would make life easy. To be approved for that, you need to be literally 4 levels up from the bottom! Root access on your desktop? Nah, but they'll give you sudo. You can't actually use your desktop for development; you'll have to work through a VM. And to make sure you don't enjoy it, your development VM will be some ancient Red Hat image, with absolutely nothing newer than 5 years old (literally!). Just in case you ever want to Google something, all the libraries, functions, and features made in the last half-decade won't work. The internal systems at Amazon are so painful that I suspect a large percentage of employees, after a hard day's work, come home and put needles in their arms for fun. When stuff works, it's slow and largely unusable, and a dozen times worse than any freeware you'll find on the internet. The source control, build systems, and all other developer tools seem like they were developed by a retarded monkey after he drank too much that night. Apparently, they're now working on an "internal GitHub that works on more SCS than just Git -- and has an awesome advanced security model." I wonder why they don't try to get their page-load times under 10 seconds first. Even things that you thought were solved 20 years ago, Amazon manages to break with their own special flavor of retardedness. Like the mailing lists. It's an accepted fact that it's impossible to reliably filter a message to a folder, because the sender is not from the mailing list; there is no mailing list header, and no required subject prefix! Another great joy is, after sending a message to a mailing list, your inbox will lag for literally the next 5 minutes as you get spammed by "Out of Office" replies. But no one expects the Amazon workplace to be functional or enjoyable, so this is just normal. And of course, then there's the bureaucracy. At first, you'll try to fight it and try to do what's best for the company. But soon you'll realize, like half the company, that it's nothing but paper-pushers -- and you can easily waste a month just trying to get approval for some trivial thing. In the end, you'll be a lot happier here if you treat it as a job, don't try to fight it, don't try to enjoy it, put in your hours and leave at the end of the day (hoping your pager doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night over some stupid issue).

Pros: There are lots of big data sets with opportunity to apply machine learning techniques. There are many talented engineers making this a good place to grow technically.

Cons: There is an on-call rotation that all SDES share. It has pluses and minuses. You learn to build more robust systems, but at the expense of getting woken up in the middle of the night.

Pros: Compensation, acknowledgement of contribution, good manager.

Cons: Average work-life balance, not interesting projects.