Amazon

You get a good salary while joining. You got to work on high, scalable, and smart systems. Good blend of technologies and automated systems.

• No work-life balance at all; upper management expects you to work on weekends.
• On-call is terrible, with a 24x7 support engineer carrying a pager to handle issues.
• Even though the notice period is one month, managers will try to delay and hold you, almost mentally harassing you to serve for around two months. I have personally seen at least four such cases across different teams. I don't understand if Amazon gives special training to managers to torture their employees.
• Expect promotion once in four years (six years for some people), unless you are good at hypocrisy and politics. There will always be a carrot to lure you until you finally give up and leave the company. Forget about awards; you will realize the job is not even rewarding.
• Hikes are not impressive unless you receive a good amount of stocks.
• One lesson: A customer-centric company is rarely employee-friendly.

• Appreciate work done by employees.
• Respect employees' personal commitments.