Pros
In all honesty, the actual job of being a Solutions Architect isn't particularly bad, in fact I loved it. AWS SA's don't get commission, so we're not constantly barraging customers with sales pitches or anything - we work to help our customers meet their goals through whatever products we can offer through the cloud. That process is usually pretty enjoyable and it's nice that we get to meet so many customers and talk to so many new people through the job.
Cons
The culture. 100% the culture. I had a manager who was out for blood, who had a deep resentment for me and many other members of my team. Why did she bear such resentment? I'm honestly not sure. But she made it her life mission to make our lives a living hell, and Amazon Leadership Principles helped her do it. The job is fine, but the culture provides the necessary tools to horrible managers to be downright awful and needlessly cruel. My manager for example would make us work during lunch because technically as "salaried employees" we're not supposed to leave during lunch. She would constantly micro-manage every little decision we made, and audit everything down to the last dime. When we took PTO or vacation, she would remind us to take our laptops with us in case she needed us last minute. One of my coworkers had a medical emergency, and she chastised her for missing work the next day as well as not notifying her of the emergency - she even made her write an essay apologizing for missing work because of her medical emergency. She would go on to place 6 people from her team onto PIP, some of whom were the most talented individuals I know. She also was so deeply ingrained in Amazon culture (drinking the kool-aid as they say) that she would preach the leadership principles to us to practice in our daily lives. Many of us tried going to HR, which proved to be useless because ultimately HR sides with the company/management, not the employees. I don't think AWS is necessarily a bad place to work, but it definitely has issues with its cult-like culture, especially because it provides management so many tools to be abusive and callous. Oh also the 401k plan at Amazon is terrible. It's 50% match up to 4% of your salary. So if you make 100k, the most Amazon will give you is 2k towards your 401k. Lastly (this is just a small one) people who work at Amazon don't even get amazon prime for free, and the "employee discount" is 10% off any products shipped and sold by amazon, but only up to $1000 ( so basically just a $100 gift card, provided you spend $1000 first).
