Pros
Competitive pay, especially with stocks. Surrounded by smart people. I've never run into anyone that was a moron. A couple lazy people, but nobody that was just dense. Working on products people use and recognize. Most everything is home-grown, so if you have a problem with a tool or interface, the code is available to look at and change, or you can track down the person responsible for it. I've experienced a mostly relaxed work environment with bouts of craziness due to deadlines and big projects. It definitely varies by team/manager. They give you a transit card and will reimburse up to $160 per month of parking. I've never heard of layoffs happening ever. The past couple years have been really booming in terms of new employees joining the company. I've seen two people get "managed out of the company" for poor performance. They were both basically given a certain amount of time to find another job before they were fired. Both left with another job. I like the location. Was closer to downtown with one team and now am in South Lake Union. There's plenty of places to eat nearby and lots of new construction popping up.
Cons
On-call rotation sucks, there's no two-ways around that. Both teams I've been on have had a one-week per every two or three months, but it still sucks during that week. Some on-call rotations are worse. Once you have 6 or 7 years under your belt and are about SDE III, you can get out of it if you set yourself up as more of an "architect" that works across many teams within an organization. The work can consume you if you let it. I haven't had much of a problem with work-life balance (except around big deadlines and on-call), but I've worked with some people that regularly put in 10-12 hour days. I'm often the last one in and the first to leave, but I make sure to get my tasks done and nobody has said anything about it. Benefits aren't great. Their 401k match is only 50% up to a total of 2% of your compensation. So if you allocate 4% of your paycheck to the 401k, you'll max out their matching contribution. Medical, dental, and vision come out of your paycheck, but it seems cheaper than previous places I've worked. The employee discount is pitiful, 10% off anything sold by Amazon directly, but limited to $100 off per year. Prime membership isn't even included or discounted for employees. None of the other glamorous tech perks are included (free food, onsite facilities, massages, whatever). The break rooms have water and coffee and include vending machines that you have to pay for. High-density seating is annoying, and people are complaining that they don't meet OSHA standards for the number of restrooms available for all the people they've crammed onto every floor. The new buildings going up in downtown (Denny Triangle) should alleviate some of this at least temporarily. The shuttles could run a little more often, especially around quitting time. It's a 12-minute walk to the bus terminal by the convention center, but that shuttle only comes by every 30 minutes or so. They recently added another shuttle route that services that stop specifically, but the two shuttles aren't staggered, so they always end up leaving the campus about the same time, defeating its usefulness. Frugality is a core principle that drives a lot of annoying policies like the lack of cool perks and developer equipment. They've finally acquiesced that developers need two monitors at their desks. Everybody just salvaged monitors left by interns or leaving employees anyway, but now they'll give you one if you ask (they may be providing them by default to new employees, now, but I'm not sure). From what I can tell the compensation lags behind places like Google and Facebook (although is pretty close to Microsoft).