Pros
For the most part, you are in control of what you are doing. You don't get micromanaged a lot. At the end of the day you will be able to see if you won or lost based on how you ran the shift and what variables you had to deal with. There is not a lot of bureaucracy or red tape and things move very quickly. The day also goes by very fast. You walk out the door at the end of the day knowing exactly what you accomplished. Salary is pretty good. Opportunities for advancement do exist and it doesn't take forever to have a chance at moving up. Lots of other opportunities for lateral movement in between different departments. Also lots of opportunity to move around the country if you like to relocate. You get to learn a lot very quickly. They encourage movement from one job to the next. Interacting with the associates can be challenging but you can develop some good relationships and help them succeed. The problem though is that there is very little room for them to move upward and most of them realize it so it can be a challenge to motivate them. There are lots of weeks where you get 3 days off. Most area managers work Weds to Sat or Sun to Weds outside of Peak. Unless mandatory OT is called for the associates you will usually get 3 days off which helps you recover from the intensity of the work week.
Cons
The area manager job is seen by most in the FC as the most difficult job at the entire company. Work/Life balance is extremely challenging. During Peak, there is none. You will work over 60 hours per week at a minimum, sometimes up to 70. For 2 months straight the alarm clock was going off at 330am to make it in to work a 13 to 14 hour day, 5 days per week. It can get very mentally and physically exhausting. I usually got one hour a day to see my wife when I got home before I had to quickly eat dinner and get to bed to do it all over again. Outside of Peak it is not nearly as bad but it is still a challenge. Outside of peak you will work 50 hours per week at a minimum. You will be on your feet 90% of the shift, walking around on concrete pushing your "desk" on a plastic cart. Your desk is a laptop. There is very little time to do projects or think creatively because of the intensity or chaos of the daily shift. You will walk a lot, usually 5 to 10 miles per shift depending on what is going on. You have to make tons of split second decisions throughout the day which can also wear you down mentally. There are probably 20 different jobs associates are able to do and there are many jobs lots of them don't want to do. So basically everyday you have to deal with people complaining to you about why they are put into this job or that job and how you as the manager favor one associate over the other, etc. This is endless. The culture of FC management towards associates at Amazon is really weird. You aren't really allowed to discipline associates properly and they are given a million chances before they are terminated. They know they can go crying to the HR department who almost always sides with the associates. So, you are put in a position where you have to be very passive aggressive in managing them to improve their performance. You have to help "remove barriers" for them when in reality, the major barrier for most of the ones that are problems for you is that they are lazy and don't want to work hard, yet you can't tell that to them in a direct way because that will come off as "abusive" towards the associate. It is really strange. You will wind up feeling a lot of times that the upper management at each FC cares more about the hourly associates well being than they do your own even though you have to work way harder than the hourly associates do. You are required to provide "feedback" to the majority of associates you manage, every week. You will manage about 100 people. Most of the feedback is negative because they had quality errors or did not make productivity rates, so you have to have a lot of difficult conversations all the time. In addition to running the shift you have to deliver probably 50 feedbacks per week, every week. This is constant. It gets old. You are required to give 2 daily standup speeches to your department in front of about 100 people which last about 3 minutes. Be sure you are ok with public speaking. There is very little training. You are really put over the deep end of the pool and they let you go and see if you can swim. If you are not comfortable with an ambiguous work environment and don't have tough skin this is not for you. The overall culture is not that good. A lot of the stuff in the NY Times article is pretty accurate. Rarely are you given thanks for working your tail off; if you succeed at 9 things and fail at 1 the conversation will usually be about how you screwed up that one thing. Bottom line is that there is a lot of room for growth and lots of different work opportunities doing many different things but you do have to deal with a lot of difficulties and stresses and have to sacrifice your home life. No matter what, working here you will learn everything there is to know about warehousing and distribution and it will look great on your resume if you perform well and you decide to leave. If you can make it a couple years you have a good chance at being promoted and make really good money.