Amazon

The best part of working for Amazon is the high salaries. Amazon has great software infrastructure, outstanding in terms of potential growth. As a software engineer, it's a good challenge to get a good picture of how everything works, but after a few months, once you get used to it, your working days become repetitive, day after day just sending emails, writing docs, and reviewing other people's docs.

Mostly everyone working at Amazon is very qualified and clever, but on the flip side, most of them lack professional experience outside of Amazon. This leads to developers who don't have real experience in software development, just in Amazon development, which is not necessarily the same, as Amazon provides a very particular and unique way to work.

The concept of teams and collaboration is not promoted by the company. Instead, Amazon promotes values which result in an environment of arrogance and competitiveness, which is not healthy and makes some team members very uncomfortable. My personal experience was that everyone is just looking at their personal growth instead of team success. Sharing knowledge and experience was a very rare occasion.

In my opinion, the worst part of working for Amazon is the level of abstraction that infrastructure brings, which ends up in making developers only good as Amazon developers and not just developers. As a developer, it was very disappointing to feel that everything I was learning was going to be useful only while I stayed working for Amazon.

Let's promote individual growth and more team building and knowledge sharing.