Amazon

A solid place to learn best practices of quality software engineering. Lots of established processes and documentation ensure only good quality code is shipped out. The environment is very structured.

Firsthand access to learning and mastering all aspects of AWS, as Amazon uses its own product to host its own infrastructure. Any training you can find here is extremely valuable and carries from job to job.

The company is "frugal," but in practice, extremely stingy. Snacks aren't free; they're behind a vending machine you need to pay for. The only napkins you get are paper towel rolls. A pro of this is that I can bet that with WFH becoming more popular, Amazon is probably going to use this to cut costs on their office buildings for software developers.

At least for my team, there was a high turnover. There were 14 people on the team when I joined, but only 10 when I left. Those 10 were not the same 14, and someone was leaving every month. We had portraits of people organized in order of likeliness to leave, and we called that the "graveyard." I thought it was a joke... until it wasn't. But that's just my experience.

Upward mobility is easy at first, then it becomes exponentially harder without too much payoff. People usually just promote and leave for another big company that pays more and has better perks since it's not worth the overwork to get to that next level. You're going to see more people earlier in their career, and the "veteran" Amazonian is incredibly rare.

There are incentives and clear goals to make it to the next level, but chances are, the workload is so high that you're probably going to burn out before you get there, and transfer out before you vest all your RSUs. WLB is not really valued; just work.

• Provide more WLB, and treat workers better, both developers and warehouse workers. Increasing the TC to the point where it is 2x the amount of other big companies does not address the health of software engineers and high turnover. • Give more perks that other big companies do for the amount of money you're paying your workers.