Pros
Seattle campus hires amazing, accomplished designers to work on device platform. The hiring process is thorough but appropriate and the talent level is great.
Cons
"frugality" as a corporate value gets interpreted in ways that are pushing ridiculous. The famous door desks are a good example, they are awful, if you need quiet or privacy to work in forget it, the open space is crowded and offices go only to vps. It's a battle to even get a decent dev/design kit setup. The comp package is totally whack (huge "signon" bonuses that extend over the two years before your stock vests, to make up for way lower base than google, ms, apple. And get taxed way higher). Recruiting process was brutal as they seem to outsource the same job to a thousand substandard contract staff. Great, great designers, but understaffed, encouraged to cut corners with some ridiculous cronyism and incompetence as you go up the food chain. You can see it in the current wave of product releases. The arrogance of longtime amazon staff in some divisions vs new hires is horrible and it's no surprise the median time spent there is 1 year. I quit and was contacted months later as to why and if I would consider coming back.
