Amazon

• Pay and bonus are good.
• Try to hire the best.
• Dogs in the office.
• Casual work environment.

• Compensation packages are misleading. They are heavy in stock awards that vest mostly 3 and 4 years after hire. Ninety percent of employees don't make it that long, so they know they don't have to pay out.

• Extremely dev-centric. They hire excellent developers and excellent dev managers. However, upper management has no love or respect for QA and hires the worst possible QA managers. Some are good, but they always seem to move on once they get sick of being treated like second-class citizens.

• Hard work is not respected nearly as much as good old-fashioned butt kissing. So many good testers left, while the absolute laziest got promoted to management; it was demoralizing.

• Some groups (not all) require excessive hours.

• Raises aren't worth the hassle of the ridiculous review process.

Put more effort into retaining the best once you hire them, rather than just hiring the best then running them into the ground.

Find QA managers that have people skills and solid QA experience.