Amazon

I spent 10 years at Amazon, starting as an engineer and growing into a senior manager. I did software development, program management, product management, and even some online marketing.

If you get the opportunity to get into the ground floor of a new initiative or business, and are lucky enough that the initiative has executive attention and becomes a business and starts growing, it will do wonders for you:

1. You will learn firsthand how businesses develop in the online world.
2. You will learn how to operate efficiently (very limited resources – people and funding, and many ideas – makes decision-making and product pivoting crucial).
3. Your career will grow fast within the company.

I have outlined an idea scenario that does occur in parts of the company, albeit to a lesser and lesser degree as the company has grown a lot and become somewhat of a different beast. So if you are looking at the company and are serious about your investment of years there, be very sensitive to the group you go to. You can land at a group that is bigger and older, but if so, perform as well as you can and then you must switch to a smaller, new business starting group. Otherwise, you will be one of many who often complain about the company:

• Only ops, hardly get to write a lot of code or groundbreaking software, too much internal tribal knowledge.
• Burnout – big group – crazy boss-driven bureaucracy.

Lastly, Amazon is a place for those who persevere in times of trouble – keep that in mind!

• Work-life balance was worst in my first 4-5 years; it got a lot better in the last 2-3.
• If you are in a big group, you will find it hard to get much done. Big systems with Amazon scale of customers are slow, sorry, that's life.
• If you are in a group with systems not yet mature for the scale, you will end up with a lot more operations (debugging, finding bugs involving hairy exception stacks, and being smart about problem-solving beyond just looking at code flow).

while(1) { printf("Increase employee discount\n"); }

:)

If you run a big group, know for sure that you have some middle management that is not needed.