Amazon

Caveat emptor: Teams are pretty siloed here. This preserves some freedom and a small-company feel while also making culture vary dramatically from team to team. I've heard of folks who made out worse than me; they ended up in that New York Times article. Your mileage may vary.

That said, here's the good stuff:

• Fast pace, near continuous deployment, and hard problems.
• Smart, fun coworkers who have become true friends.
• Ownership of your tasks through the full development lifecycle.
• Open feedback is encouraged and practiced.
• You have the ability to introduce change, though some teams are more resistant to change than others. Regardless, you'll have to work hard to make an impact.
• Good work-life balance for an intense programming job: yes, the on-call rotation occasionally makes you answer a page at night, but you're not expected to work late generally, even under impending deadlines. The team owns deadlines, not individuals.

Oh. Compensation is great, but you probably knew that already.

Top-down management style.

Developers don't have much control over which problems they solve once they join a team, though they have lots of freedom in designing solutions.

Promotions are opaque and often frustrating, though they're currently introducing new policies to try changing that. If your goal is to get promoted quickly, this is not the place to be.

Gender ratio: heavily male.

Lots of old, decrepit internal tooling. Internal documentation is disorganized and often out of date.

Keep pushing to make promotions more transparent and predictable.

Find a better solution to internal documentation.

Bring in more female developers.

Find management mechanisms to prevent those NYT horror stories from happening.

Give developers more insight and ownership of which tasks they end up working on.