The problems that you try to solve at Amazon are all state-of-the-art: software problems like scaling a huge distributed systems, artificial intelligence, personalized recommendations, web analytics and data mining, etc. All the skills I learned from Amazon are on great demand by the software industry, and companies highly respected my experience at Amazon. If you enjoy spending nights to tackle hard problems at school, it is the right place for you.
The benefits are superb; they give the best rates to engineers, higher than the company that offers free food, the blue monster in the same city, and others. It is the best evidence that they really value engineering talents. It's not just a lip service.
Amazon has remained a flat, decentralized structure after all these years, which is uncommon at their size. It is great because you don't have 20 managers to report to. Decisions got made fast, and every engineer has a say in it. Politics is little since teams are pretty independent. But it has its own negatives too. The flat organization could sometimes be chaotic. Since teams don't talk to each other much, larger, cross-team projects could be quite inefficient. There's a tendency of reinventing the wheel, instead of using software tools already been done by the team next to you.
And the pager. Software engineers have to rotate and share the pager. We have to be on call and whenever shit hits the fan go back and solve the problems. It means you get called back while going out with your girlfriend, having a family dinner, or lying on the beach. It could be really tough sometimes when the problem was in the code that somebody else wrote.
