Amazon

I've worked in several top-tier companies in my life, including 13 years at Microsoft. I would much rather be at Amazon.

At Amazon, you're responsible for your own work. You have support if you ask for it, but otherwise, you're expected to put on your big-boy pants every morning and just get it done.

The culture of most teams at Amazon is to get it done quickly, see how people like it, then iterate. Very scrappy, very agile.

Everything is about customer value. If you're not adding to customer value with every iteration, what are you working on? Yes, there are platform and foundational improvements that we make as well, but overall, the goal is improving the customer experience at every turn.

You will learn a lot, not just coding practices, but running large cloud services at scale, how to prep for and survive peaks which can increase your traffic 10x for a few hours, how to push change through an organization even though you're "just an engineer".

Great mobility. At any time, there are tens of thousands of job openings, and as long as you're an average or better performer, you can apply to any of them at any time.

During these tough times, there's a lot of support for working from home. Having trouble coding on your laptop? They'll buy you a monitor. Back hurting? They'll buy you a chair.

L10s (VPs) are sharp and are paid to look for the problems. It's difficult to hide anything from them. This makes the whole org better.

Focusing on the customer can lead some teams down the path of adding features rather than eliminating tech debt. Teams that operate in this mode have happy product managers and unhappy engineers.

The work is hard, and you're expected to operate at 100% all the time.

At higher levels, compensation is mostly stock. That's great if stock keeps going up, but it sucks if stock goes down.

My whole Amazon career has been with tech teams, so I can't comment about non-tech headquarters roles or any of the logistics and fulfillment roles.

Reducing tech debt should be a goal for every team every year. Right now, it depends on the intestinal fortitude of the manager to make it happen.