Pros
- learn so much about building, delivering, and monitoring software - work with tons of smart people - fantastic build and deployment tools compared to other software shops - needs to be great to work at Amazon scale. If you think you need a tool chances are someones already built it - your developer box is in the cloud - whatever hardware you need for the job it’s there - decent pay compared to others in Vancouver, for the first while anyways - Vancouver teams strive to have good work life balance - since your experience is heavily dependent on your management chain and so many teams with open head count, if your current team is not a fit there is probably another team that is. Internal movement is encouraged (better to keep you at Amazon than lose you) - Amazon values arent just words - they live and breathe the values. Customer obsession is key. - you’re building at the bleeding edge of the cloud. Some really cool stuff at incredible scale gets built, and more often than not you can be proud of what you build
Cons
- though Vancouver office strives for work life balance, politics from Seattle come into play - can be perception that you’re “doing less work” even if its just better planning. - hard to get visibility with management chain in Seattle - if you’re not constantly putting out fires you’re not visible and delivering - not so good long term retention - lot of people churn (benefit of this is getting to know the smart people and where they are going) - after signing bonus is up, bonuses afterwards are underwhelming - many just stick it out until vested - stress from on call rotation - you’re not just a developer but you’re also the one who gets paged when software your team owns breaks (rotates among the team). Good in theory to get issues and customer problems resolved quickly, but adds a lot more stress to an already fast paced environment. - Good luck getting promoted, especially if you’re in Vancouver and someone in Seattle needs to approve it. So much complexity and red tape here, it seems like it would be easier to quit and get hired into next level than to get promoted.