I know 4 people who’ve worked for them, two on the same team, one who’s moved around various offices over a long period of time, and one who used to work for me but left to go there (and with the offer they were made I absolutely don’t blame them - we’d been hit hard by COVID and were in the midst of a salary freeze).
The first three of those people seem to have got on well there and mostly enjoyed it. The fourth had a miserable 8 months. Their manager was based in a different office with a 5+ hour time difference and was a complete nightmare, and they left of their own accord to another job on about the same money but without all the extra hours, stress, and terrible management.
I’m guessing Amazon is like other big companies: the quality of your experience will depend to a very large extent on your manager.
I've worked with some Amazon fanboys who'd rave about being "bar raisers" and other assorted nonsense, trying to impress Amazon-derived "leadership principles" upon much smaller organizations. It left a very bad taste in my mouth.
Well FAANG is now MANGO and yes Amazon dropped out of the top tier of tech companies on the market per these acronyms. Theres a few others other there gaining popularity which also now exclude Amazon as a top tier tech company.
Amazon is successful on the boring utility stuff (logistics, building data centers) but is broadly seen as unable to execute on higher value add things, which keeps it out of the top tier. The AI misses really highlighted that.
Isn’t AWS a massive value add operation on top of what is otherwise just rental servers?
It isn’t sexy, but they are selling their proprietary technology to just about everyone. That and their market cap puts them in league with the rest of the big boys.
[0] Performance Improvement Plan aka the chapter where manger together with HR build up the convincing paper trail to fire a person.