Amazon

• Work on stuff that your friends and family use and love.
• Company culture is a meritocracy.
• Company culture makes sense/is logical (which for engineers is important).
• One of the least political places to work.
• Engineering teams have lots of ownership: no software architects or 200-page requirement documents. Thin product management layer.
• Managers are good individual contributors, not just people managers.
• Peer review culture (of your code/designs/deliverables).
• The feedback produces lots of personal growth and better engineers.
• No one asks you to do overtime/work weekends/etc.
• Pretty flexible working for people with kids (as long as prepared to commit to coming into the office most of the time).
• The Amazon reading and writing practice is awesome.
• Crappy teammates get encouraged to leave the company quickly.
• Company promotes women and minorities, educates staff on implicit bias, etc.
• The NYT article was completely inaccurate/trash/rubbish/basura.
• I could see myself spending the rest of my career here.

There is always too much to do. You have to manage your time and avoid over-committing. You have to have discipline over your own time to innovate and stay up to date on things going on outside the company.

It's easy to confuse the wisdom of teams (which is huge) with individual wisdom. Yes, the people in the room are as stupid as you are; just collectively they appear smarter.

Not a good fit for talented people/geniuses who struggle to pay attention, are too laid back, not detail-oriented, can't be anything other than a big fish in a small sea, or don't realize the company and customer comes first.

Lots of meetings (that pro about peer review culture has a counter-balance) if you aren't prudent about declining.

There are definitely better benefits in other companies. Amazon's opinion is they'd rather pay you well and you buy your own lunch rather than supply lunch every day, for example.

It can take a long time for people to figure out how to be successful and how that changes as people move up. More time should be spent on educating people on success and value.