Amazon

The sheer scale of problems you get to solve at Amazon is unmatched. Your code can literally touch hundreds of millions of customers overnight. If you want your work to have massive real-world impact, this is the place.

As exhausting as the interview process is, it ensures a baseline level of competence among your peers. You will learn from some of the sharpest engineers in the industry. My coding standards and system design skills grew exponentially here.

For a company that preaches frugality and two-pizza teams, the amount of internal processes is staggering. Getting security reviews, cost approvals, or even basic access to another team's API can take weeks of navigating DocWiki pages and sitting through endless recurring meetings.

Ask specifically about the team's on-call schedule and support rotation during your bar.