Amazon

Amazon is a great place to learn and grow. At least my team encourages this fully. Many teams encourage you to find where you fit best after you start with them (in case you get bored, Amazon would rather keep you around and place you somewhere else than let you go). Amazon workers have a wide variety of ages, experiences, and personalities.

Amazon teams are small and run like independent start-ups. They report up the chain but are largely autonomous. They can create their own tools, make their own decisions, give away tools, and re-write everything to use a different language. They do whatever they want as long as it's giving value to Amazon as a whole. I know of only one case where a team was disbanded because it was (at the time) not worth the money put into it. None of the engineers were sacked; they were simply put on other teams.

Continuous deployment. Amazon (with a few special exceptions) promotes continuous deployment of software. I often deploy deltas for the project(s) I'm working on 5+ times a day.

Far too political. It is difficult to move up at Amazon because so much of it is politics. Does your boss like you enough? Have you developed the right connections across the company? Can you write a 20-page document that explains exact situations in which you've accomplished each of the Amazon goals and tenets? There is little reward for the code you've written, the problems you've solved, and the ideas you've offered, unless you have the connections and can write the stories.

Too much operational overhead / reactive problem-solving. Amazon keeps its teams small. This is good, but also bad. Too often, we are stopped from working on our current projects and deadlines in order to respond to operational burdens and to react to an idea that someone had. A security fix here, a customer request there, January review season, and other things that I cannot give details about. As a professional Software Engineer, I want to write code, not review documents. I don't mind flushing out bugs and responding to feature requests. I just don't like being told to do so immediately at the expense of other deadlines.

It goes a bit without saying that you need to be good at socializing and communicating. It is not good enough at Amazon to be (one of) the best member(s) of your team. You have to be great at talking to other people. This is not a place for the shy, quiet hard worker. Delivering results isn't enough.

Compensation package is oddly distributed. I would rather get an even amount of stock each year that I work here, but you get 80% of this part of compensation in your 3rd and 4th year. This is unlike most other tech companies, and is targeted at retaining employees. However, a better way to maintain employees might be to reduce the politics.

Frugality. One of Amazon's tenets is being frugal. I understand the reasons behind it; it's not just to save the company money, but also to inspire deeper thinking and looking for new solutions. But Amazon could do a little more to make its employees more comfortable: nicer computers, snacks, even periodic lunches. Small things, I know, but they help bring employees together just as well as they make them happier.

Try to reduce the politics. It's ridiculous. Some people are great programmers, but terribly shy. That shouldn't bar them from being promoted or moving up.

The idea of having two seasons where you can potentially get promoted a year is also ridiculous. When a person earns it, they should receive it. It would probably be less work for management if they didn't have to go through 100 documents two times a year, and instead did 10 documents every now and then.