Amazon

The company highly focused on meeting customers' needs.

Software development is very mature, and there are lots of tools to support engineering best practices.

In general, people are talented and hardworking.

Culture based on Leadership Principles is actually applied on a daily basis.

• Growing in the technical path is far from trivial. Employees really need to fight for their promotions, even if their performance is bar-raising for several years.
• Managers don't have much technical knowledge.
• Managers and stakeholders are constantly asking for effort estimates, but predicting things at Amazon is very hard, and usually predictions are just wild guesses that people end up taking as promises set in stone.

• Stop asking for estimates. Focus on breaking the work down into smaller chunks and check up regularly to see if there are any blockers.

• Set small milestones and try to anticipate working code as soon as possible instead of requiring engineers to come up with wild guesses about future deliverables.

• Improve compensation and perks.

• Try to reduce inefficiencies by escalating matters more quickly and strive for your team to work independently from other teams, especially those that are in different time zones.