Amazon

Money, Money, Money, Money, Money

Working conditions (small cubes), tools available (one-size-fits-all computers don't really fit all sizes), competence of project managers (disorganized, no formal requirements setting), the need to maintain your own systems (nighttime and weekend calls/pages), lack of testers, and lack of support staff.

Basically, engineers are highly skilled web developers and system administrators.

The compensation scheme also doesn't put much emphasis on performance, so compensation is pretty similar if you did a good job or a bad one. People who are jerks, who don't get along with anyone and disrupt teams, aren't handled. They stick around forever.

Faster turnaround on evaluations, and put more emphasis on performance when determining compensation -- maybe move to larger bonuses (immediate bonuses; 2-year-away stock doesn't count).

Realize that a significant percentage of the best developers in the industry change jobs every 2-3 years. Make Amazon a place they want to stop in.

Give developers more freedom to get more tools. You spend over $150K/year on them, but won't give them another gig of RAM or a third monitor?

Invest in TPMs. They need to be technical and understand requirements.

Make it easier to get rid of people.

Why can't we have more web developers to do HTML?

Why do most of us have pagers and not support staff who aren't developers?

Why don't we have more testers?