Pros
I worked on an amazing team of smart ICs, with cool problems to solve at scale. The culture encourages a strong sense of ownership. Good results are generally rewarded. I grew more as an engineer in one year here than I did in multiple years elsewhere. My immediate management chain was great. Work/life balance was prioritized despite occasionally noisy oncall shifts. Junior engineers' development was fostered. My manager was always very transparent about what metrics were being looked at for performance, and still wasn't a slave to the numbers.
Cons
Benefits are not that competitive against peers, especially time off. My team suffered from some scope issues at the higher levels (promotions beyond 6 were difficult to impossible for political reasons). As everyone surely knows, Amazon's senior leadership has top-downed an aggressive RTO policy. Sure, plenty of tech companies have implemented RTO. Amazon's leadership just did it in an incredibly deceitful, trust-destroying way. The implementation details of what they landed on at the point I left were already worse (less flexible, less room for managers to make day to day exceptions) than Amazon's peers. Obviously, by next January, they will be even worse.
