Source: I am an Amazon employee.
I’ve been here for ~4.5 years, on 3-4 teams across 2 different orgs. I work as an applied scientist (i.e. data scientist who meets the SDE bar, and works on an engineering team).
My personal experience has been that the reports you’ll find online have been greatly exaggerated. On none of my teams have I been expected to work more than 40 hours/wk, and all of my managers have been nice. I’ve worked 1-3 people who I believe to have been PIP’d, but they were legitimately low performers (highly opinionated, difficult to work with, unproductive).
I don’t doubt people have bad experiences. Amazon leaves a lot of power to managers, and that enables abuse probably more than other companies.
Amazon doesn’t attempt to be as employee-friendly as Google. If that’s important to you, it probably won’t be a good fit.
Amazon mostly focuses on the business, and treats employees mostly as the market requires. For engineers in a tight labor market, that means at least somewhat generously as long as you’re contributing value.
Amazon is known for being a place where nobody will hold your hand. I think the culture of ramping up new employees is weak, and more tenured employees are generally quite focused on their own work. This means a lot of unnecessary stress when you first start here imo, but it also demands some level of entrepreneurialism and self-sufficiency. These are good skills to develop and be held accountable to.
It’s a big company, and whether your experience is positive/negative is mostly a function of the team/manager you end up with.
The promotion process seems intentionally obstructive, although lots of people do get promoted (i.e. most everyone who joins as SDE I and sticks around).
I’ve had (several?) local primary care doctors hint that a fair amount of people working here are either anxious or depressed. Not sure how true that is elsewhere in tech though. I have a suspicion that FAANG companies in general attract a lot of people with existing insecurities, and so I think that might come with the territory to some extent. Though I could totally see Amazon’s culture exacerbating that.
So is it worth it? I’d probably do it again. I don’t love the place as an employer, but it’s not nearly as bad the internet makes it out to be in my personal experience. Many of the employee/culture problems you’ll see at Amazon exist at other FAANG companies (and in corporations in general)… Amazon is somewhat more openly capitalistic and thus the problems probably exist to a somewhat greater degree, but still the variance between mid-large tech companies is much smaller than the variance within them.
Honestly I’m much more bothered by the lack of meaningfulness in having my life’s work being a contribution to a consumerist shopping platform than how Amazon treats me… and in that respect, switching to the addiction/surveillance/advertising FAANGs/other tech companies isn’t much of an upgrade.
Just one perspective.