Pros
I hear this is certainly not true for every team, but I think my team is great and I’m very happy at Amazon. - My work life balance is great. I hardly ever have to work more than 40 hours/week. The few times that I do, I don’t particularly mind since I rarely have to. - My team and manager are really chill. Nobody cares when I get to the office, when I leave, or exactly how many hours I was there. I’m certainly expected to get my work done, but I feel like I have a lot of freedom to work on my projects however I’d like. I also work from home about once a week. - This is especially true for Amazon Web Services (where I work) but I feel fortunate that I can learn how to use all the services on AWS for free. My field uses AWS pretty extensively, but it’s normally pretty expensive if you want to use it a lot. We get it all for free and we use it a lot in our everyday work, so I feel pretty lucky to be able to learn it.
Cons
- Compared to other tech companies Amazon is undoubtedly very cheap. We have to pay for all of our own food, the food is expensive, and it’s also mediocre. Parking isn’t even free. Our benefits are okay but not as good as other tech companies. Our office space looks fine but pretty minimalist. I find this to be minor in the grand scheme of things but it’s definitely noticeable. - I dislike being on-call. I’m on call for a week at a time about once every two months. During that time you’re handed a pager and you have to be available 24/7 for issues. This could potentially be on a random weekend afternoon, 8 am in the morning, or worst of all, the dreaded 3 am pager ringing. Fortunately I’m not on-call all that often so I just suck it up and deal with it whenever it rolls around.