Vantaggi
The main reason I have worked here now for so many years is the sense of autonomy, influence, and feeling of ownership over the product. I work directly with project managers and designers to collaborate on solutions rather than being handed specifications to implement blindly. Reading and replying to customer feedback keeps me connected to ways of improving the product and coming up with tasks myself to fix problems. It's a lot like working at a startup in that I have a wide scope of responsibilities and influence, while still being in the safety of an Amazon subsidiary company. IMDb also has its own culture that is separate from the parent company in a good way. I'm rarely required to work nights or weekends, though I sometimes do just because I'm really excited about something I'm working on. Unlike many parts of Amazon, we have an operations team that handles the first line of on-call. We usually only get paged when it's not something that the operation team can mitigate quickly.
Svantaggi
While we have a lot of cool ideas for new features, it can be frustrating to see them get deprioritized and forgotten about. The work we end up doing tends to focus on direct ways to get short term gains rather than investing in the product to grow our user base over time. Often, we can only get things done if we don't need to ask for help from other teams. Being one of the first internet companies, we have also had a lot of technical debt that has prevented us from accomplishing bold new ideas. We're very close to eliminating the biggest piece of that debt and I'm hopeful that things will begin to change. Previously I've felt that upper management has tended to attract some people who wanted to use IMDb as a stepping stone to bigger and better things elsewhere. Though, in the past one or two years this has changed. I'm now impressed with our current leadership and tentatively hopeful at the direction of the company. You probably won't get to work on a really cool secret project like you might find at Amazon. Most work here is routine and incremental. Only people who are excited about the company and successful in finding ways to get things done tend to enjoy working here.