Amazon

Awesome customer focus. You'll learn what customer focus really means, instead of the half-hearted stuff you see in most other companies.

If you're an adrenaline junkie who always likes to be on edge, racing against the clock in an imaginary race, you'll like it here. Disclaimer: You'll get tired of it pretty soon though.

This place scars you for life. Read more at the end of this section.

Forget your life, health, and everything else if you want to be successful here. To the company, you're just a resource to be used until you're all used up and then discarded. That, they say, is the price of success.

If you're someone who likes their 7 hours of sleep a day, stay away. If you're someone who has hobbies that take more than a few seconds of your time, stay away. If you're someone who has a family that you'd like to spend more than a few seconds of a day with, stay away. If you have friends who you want to talk to more than once a year, stay away.

If you're smart, stay away – you can land a job at a much better workplace. The work here isn't technically challenging at all; it is challenging in the sense that you're woken up in the middle of the night and have to fix things however you can, however quickly you can, so that you can be in to work the next day.

If you think you'll learn how to write good code or design complex systems, think again – you're just going to fight fires and write hacky code to quickly patch up someone else's mess. The aim is just speed, and secondly, something that works somehow. The end result is an unprofessional and messy codebase, which even the worst coders in my class in college would have been ashamed of.

Their on-call system is probably the worst.

A NOTE TO THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO JOIN AMAZON, OR THOSE WHO RECENTLY JOINED:

If you can turn down your offer and continue interviewing elsewhere, I'd suggest doing that. If you've got no other option, or if you've recently joined, give it a few months; don't assume things will improve – they never do. My first month was an excellent representation of the other 22 months I stayed there.

Keep coding on the side to keep up your design skills. I personally know so many people who were scared to interview at other places, since they felt they'd lost all skills. If you feel the same way, don't worry – some open-source coding is good enough to bring you up to scratch.

Don't let their ridiculous stock vesting cycle trap you! You'll lose most of your stocks whenever you leave.

If you realize you're starting to have more headaches, or your blood pressure is beginning to get higher, or if you face any health issues whatsoever, just put in your papers. Those are the first symptoms that things are beginning to go downhill. The adrenalin junkie lifestyle is not for everyone, and there's no shame in quitting.

This place scars you for life. I'm still suffering the after-effects, almost 3 years after I've left, and my health is slowly improving (thankfully) now. It also changes your mindset and how you react to things that are normal at a workplace. Less than two years there, and my instinctive reaction to a problem at work has become figuring out a hack; just focus on the extremely short-term and forget about the medium and long-terms. I've also realized I now had trust issues at work. I initially looked at teammates in my new workplace (one of the best companies to work for) as potential backstabbers.

I could go on and on, but long story short – STAY AWAY! You do NOT want to ever work here. Unless you don't appreciate your current employer – in which case, go work for Amazon for a year and return to your old workplace. After working for Amazon, anywhere else will seem like heaven!

I know it probably comes from Bezos himself, but as a company, Amazon must think at least a little about the long term. Saying 'We've been successful so far just being shortsighted and thinking only of today; Bezos will take care of thinking of anything beyond tomorrow' just makes you an incredibly slow and sluggish company that is also a horror to work for. I left.