Amazon

The South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle is excellent. Amazon set me up in corporate housing, and I had less than a mile's walk to work every day. Almost everyone I met at Amazon was very intelligent and friendly, and I made many instant friends. The work environment is very laid back. I could listen to music, my coworkers could bring their dogs, and we could go to lunch or internal events freely. As long as the work got done, management was fine with anything. Amazon fully adopts the "startup feel" most modern tech companies live by.

Amazon is a very flat, wide company, and teams are often professionally isolated from one another. I never met my boss's boss, let alone saw or heard from any upper management. Work itself varies significantly from team to team.

My coworkers were excellent, but my intern project was poorly defined, uninteresting, and poorly managed. Because my team was small and always had one person on-call, my coworkers often seemed overworked.

The leadership principles are more or less the only things I saw from Upper Management. Company-wide tech talks, discussion forums, or events otherwise sponsored by Upper Management might have gotten me more excited about working for the company. I wish I could say that I saw Mr. Bezos at least once during my summer of working for him.