Pros
In management compensation is aggressive. For people coming out of school as Area Managers, the salary is high for a first job. For professionals coming from another company/field they tac on a robust signing bonus that gets baked into your salary for the first two years. Stock options vest after two years. 4 day work week in most cases with 3 days off in a row. Benefits are good and on par with any good company. A lot of opportunities for growth (not necessarily as a leader but in position and pay) if you play the game. If you are willing to relocate (which they will pay for) and you are well-liked, you will get promoted simply because there is that much need because of the company's growth.
Cons
First I'll say that there is not a strong company culture so the experience can vary greatly depending on the Senior leadership team of each site. My experience is from OAK4 which is literally the worst FC in the company to work (based on employee surveys). Firstly, job specific training was virtually non-existent. The first week of training is geared at showing you each part of the operations from the associate's perspective. You will spend time actually doing each of the repetitive tasks that associates do every day. The second week is leadership training but not for your specific role. They just go over things like how to log on to VPN, company videos and where to find certain resources. After that the experience can vary. I showed up to my site with no welcome and told to follow certain people for extended periods of time. There was no circling back or review of learnings, it was literally follow this person and pick up what you can. There was not a big investment made. Many said it's because turnover is so high, but I would argue the reverse; that turnover is so high because of the lack of investment. While the pay is good, the 2-year bonus is there so that you have to aggressively try to move up. There really isn't a place for someone that doesn't want to get promoted. So keep it to yourself if that is your reality. Trust very few people, and work to parlay it into a better opportunity within the first two years would be my advise. After two years when the bonus runs out it won't be worth it. Get your first vest and be ready to move on. The 4 day schedule can change quickly and fairly often with little notice. Some sites rotate it regularly on a schedule, and some just change it based on needs. Most sites do front half (Sun-Wed) and back half (Wed-Sat) days and nights. A lot of people don't like nights and most don't like back half, but with both of those the crazy goes away a bit as a consolation prize. The 4 day thing can temporarily go away at the drop of a dime. If business needs says that there needs to be a 5th day, Senior leadership will make the call. The lead time on this could be as little as a day and it could go on for weeks at a time. Same with longer shifts. Associates work 10 hours, so as a leader expect an 11-12 hour norm due to pre-shift and post-shift meetings. When the associates get put on mandatory 12 hour shifts naturally it extends the leaders to 13-14 hours. This can be mitigated but not avoided. Even if you work very efficiently you will fall in this range. If you don't, it'll be even longer. There is not much true leadership development. Development often is learning new things and becoming more of an expert about the operations. However, not much in the realm of real leadership development that will be transferable and helpful in your career after Amazon. Obviously this depends a lot on your supervisor, but it's not made important, and therefore difficult to do even if the desire is there, due to competing demands. You will have to manage much more than you lead. There is extreme micro-managing and constant bullying. Managers get things done out of fear of consequences not of a true belief that what they are doing is the right thing. The amount of unnecessary email communication is frankly ridiculous. You will end up deleting over a thousand emails a day (no exaggeration). The important stuff is mixed in there so get control of that quickly through rules and email organization. While it is possible to avoid, the overwhelming volume often encourages people to log on often from home and get the emails sent to their phone. It's a personal choice. Very low integrity in terms of reporting. 80% of the people pencil-whip 80% of the reports. Trying to do it the right way will extend your hours and add a lot of pressure. From an HR perspective it's tough as well. Not a strong HR culture and I found that most of the people were just overmatched in terms of what they were asked to do. It's pretty scary the things that went on from inappropriate relationships to flat out lies and integrity issues. This was the scariest part of my experience as I felt that it could all come crumbling down.
