I had an *awesome* time interning at Amazon.com.
Pros:
- Interns tend to get meaty projects. Mine was incredibly fun and interesting.
- My coworkers were all very smart people.
- The pay is great.
- Seattle is a fantastic city, and if you live in corporate housing you get tons of opportunities to hang out with fellow interns.
Cons:
- While intern projects are all meaty, they're not always interesting. Some interns had fairly mundane, boring projects to work on.
- I never quite got the hang of their homegrown deployment system which got in the way many times. This seems to be a common experience - I think most big tech companies have this sort of problem.
If you plan on interning at Amazon.com, seek out the most interesting teams to work with since that's almost entirely your choice (the earlier you accept, the better). Ask people you know who work there or who have worked there before about your options. I worked on Personalization, and if you're into AI/machine learning you should definitely try and get a spot on one of their teams. If you're a systems-y type then try and get a position with whoever's working the major AWS backends - EC2, S3, etc. There are a lot of cool things that are happening at Amazon, so definitely do plenty of research beforehand.
