Amazon

• Good exposure to large-scale operations and high operational standards (2 years is enough to gain such experience if you haven't before).
• Working with highly skilled individuals everywhere.
• Mobility in the meaning of moving between teams, countries, or roles (it is very wise not to stay in your team after promotion).
• Interesting challenges that you won't see in smaller companies.
• The location of the Dublin office is good.
• Budget for conference attendance and trainings.

Worked in Dublin office for more than 4 years.

• It is not a global company, and I don't think they want Amazon to be one. Shutting down all offices except the ones in Seattle today would mean it continues 99% of its operations fine.
• If you are not based in Seattle, accept limited visibility and slower career progress for yourself.
• All the tools you will spend nights figuring out are internally developed, so there is no use of this experience outside of the AWS services you are exposed to.
• Due to internally developed tooling everywhere, you will be working far from open-source or commercial solutions that exist on the market.
• Contradicting leadership principles allows your manager or peers to knock you out or praise you, depending on what he or she wants to do.
• The high-performance culture is internally interpreted as a "step over others to climb up" culture unless you are a genius.
• If you are the type of individual (a political animal) who will not mind crushing anyone in your path to succeed, Amazon is a great place. No one will stop you as long as you have enough political (not technical) skills to project how good you are and how bad others in your team are.
• If you are the type of individual who cares about his or her team and team goals, you will be penalized for your good intentions in the process. When you question it, you will be thrown a couple of leadership principles and told that your career is 100% your responsibility. So, unless you end up with a good manager (actually, good ones don't last as the culture doesn't want them to be supportive and good to their directs), you are always in danger and eventually going to leave.
• The office environment is pretty bad in terms of positive energy. Burned-out engineers who never smile at work are shouldering heavy on-call duties due to a duct-taping approach to bad solutions everywhere.
• Anyone joining as a level 4-5 engineer in an office outside of Seattle should expect to spend 8-10 years being promoted to Level 7/Principal, even if they exchange their life for it.
• If you are not based in Seattle, accept that you will hear important details after you've missed the opportunity to react or grab it, and nobody will care, as everything in Seattle is awesome.
• Work/life balance doesn't exist, and it will drain you quickly.
• The stress of covering your corner every day doesn't feel worth it.
• Health insurance for family is not fully covered.
• Pension plan is below average (3% if you don't contribute).

I am pretty sure none of you bother to change anything as long as Amazon/AWS continues to grow and there are enough CVs flowing in from developing countries.

So keep up the good work and push attrition rate up and continue to call this "Amazon is not for everyone. Only for the best of the best."