Amazon

Amazon has a lot of interesting projects and is very product-focused as a company. Amazon likes engineers to have ownership, meaning that a developer takes responsibility and has freedom to design and implement his/her product features. It's easy to transfer to other projects to gain different domains of knowledge. Because of the ownership mentality, the company also has many hands-on volunteer programs for career development, i.e.:

• Interview bar raiser
• Security certifier
• SDE bootcamp trainer
• API reviewer

Even though ambiguity exists in every project, the product goal is clearly guided by the company leadership principles. The company is very good at commercializing technology for its customers, so the chance of an SDE's contribution making it to the end-user stage is very high. As in the tech industry, there are some crunch times when the major holiday season approaches, but the company as a whole cares about work-life balance. Flexible hours and working from home are commonly seen among teams.

For external hires, Amazon has a higher bar in terms of experience. For example, x number of years in y company is not equivalent to x number of years at Amazon.

The research effort is proportionally small compared to other mega tech companies. Research projects have limited resources and can be canceled quickly if deadlines are not met.

Contribution to the engineering community is relatively small compared to other tech companies.

Contribute more back to the engineering community.

Employee benefits are above average, but still not as good as other big tech companies. We are considering increasing the benefits to retain talent.