Amazon

• Standardized promotion processes. As a young engineer, it makes it so easy to set goals and grow.

• Competitive pay.

• WFH whenever I want.

• Offices and teams all over the world. Amazon actively encourages you to explore internal transfer opportunities if it will help you achieve your goals.

• Unlimited mentorship and networking. People don't stay here forever, but they generally leave to do big things. Shake as many hands as possible.

• Opportunities to work on software impacting millions of people. If not on an external-facing team, at least guaranteed to be solving problems with customer obsession and operational excellence focus. Extremely valuable if you're interested in being a tech lead or manager one day.

• Constantly growing mindset. If you manage to stay in a team for 3+ years, it will most certainly grow and split into two or three teams. Lots of opportunities to influence, move into management, etc. can really take your career to the next level.

• Recruiters will start begging you to talk to them. Your value as a candidate increases tenfold.

Fast pace. Once you get the hang of things, the amount of work to do will feel endless. It's exciting because it helps you grow and learn, but it can be stressful at times too. Communicate with your manager and set clear expectations for work-life balance.

Management style. Amazon is big on its leadership principles. It's a source of truth to guide decision-making. It works pretty well for deciding the scope of projects. It's also used to evaluate performance. Sometimes it's helpful; other times, it feels like lip service your manager has to do. Once, I was switching context to a new project, and my manager called me out for "Bias for Action" for not starting it quicker. Sorry, switching projects isn't exactly something I can do in 5 minutes... so it can feel like micromanagement sometimes. But again, you have to set the boundary yourself. He's just doing his job.

Some teams are awesome, and some are truly ruthless. While internal transfer is encouraged, no one will hold your hand through it. If you think you won't be successful long-term in your team, start exploring internally and drive the transfer process yourself. Your initial team placement is completely random, and you might hate it, but they couldn't care less. Your manager is a salesman for your team at the end of the day (and by extension, for his own job security, lol), so take some things they say with a grain of salt.

On-call. Again, this totally depends on your team. My new team is really great about it; I'm on-call every two months, and getting paged is considered rare. Even when it does happen, it forces you to learn your system inside out and be a good engineer.

Now... my old team got paged 20 times a week or so. I've talked to folks with 50+ pages per week too. If you are someone who... how do I phrase this... likes to put up some walls between work and life, you need to run away from this situation as soon as possible. The whole team morale and chemistry is awful; people quit every three months, and you need to be a special kind of psychopath to enjoy such a lifestyle. You aren't allowed to talk about how it's affecting you mentally/emotionally either; they will just tell you to get used to it. I'm proud to have worked here, but I'm ashamed of what these teams/managers are doing to young, clueless, vulnerable people who just want to become better developers or simply provide for their family.

Amazon wants you to feel like you're at work. No Disneyland-looking office and no free food. Free coffee and snacks are common though. I don't mind this, but take it as you will.

A lot of things are automated. This isn't a bad thing for seasoned devs, but as a young dev, I'm feeling like I'm missing out on learning about key DevOps concepts, just because so much of it is automated at Amazon.

Invest a little more time in the mentorship of SDEs.

Coming into a giant company like Amazon is a scary and tough transition.

Help new SDEs feel at home and guide them on their career path.