Amazon

Excellent teammates. Great internal tools and resources. Many learning opportunities. World-class products to work on. High pace of innovation. Huge writing culture. This leads to excellent on-the-fly documentation and elevates the level of product planning. Flat structure. There is a feeling that anyone can speak up on any issue--just make sure you have a solid backing to your thoughts or a compelling idea if it is not yet well-considered.

Extremely team dependent. I know some that have moved around many times before settling into a team they liked.

Teams can be isolated from one another.

Culture is hit-or-miss. The leadership principles are excellent at unifying such a large organization's mindset and objectives, but they can also be used as a cheap substitute for true critical thinking.

You will never be asked to work late, but many do from simple passion. If you want to stand out, you may find that you have to do the same.

All pros and cons essentially break down to this: Amazon is a huge company. There are opportunities and difficulties that will inherently arise from that, but it manages them fairly well.

Prioritization from higher-ups needs to be well-communicated to teams in advance. Demands for project planning made before any design work has been done will lead to inaccurate estimates, leaving teams with three options:

• Overworking those assigned to the project
• Shifting resources away from another project or KTLO work
• Pushing dates out further

Combine these pressures from management with inevitable scope creep, unexpected implementation complexities, and aligning engineering work with other projects that may be at different stages of planning, and it can create unpleasant relationships with management and stress within teams.