Amazon

Super smart people. Lots of things to learn.

• Bad work-life balance.
• Unpaid on-call and extra hours.
• Unrealistic expectations from employees.
• Extreme operational load. Too little software engineering, and too much dealing with fires in legacy systems.
• Management is too focused on delivering results and frugality, and not on any other leadership principle. If you show good ownership or high standards, that won't matter in your performance review.
• Management doesn't care about your career path and your own interests. You'll be assigned tasks that don't motivate you forever, because people with more tenure on the team will be able to finish "interesting tasks" faster.
• Performance reviews are not fair: you might get a bad performance review just because someone needs to receive one, even if you meet all the required criteria for a good performance.
• Compensation adjustment is not fair: you'll find people in the exact same position and team as you, who were hired some months later, and they earn between 10% and 35% more. Even if you have the maximum performance possible, your increase in one year won't be more than 5%, so you will need to be working 10 hours per day for 5 years to reach the same compensation.
• No flexibility in terms of time off: management will reject petitions to work from another city/country, take more than 2 weeks in a row of vacation, or change on-call shifts to allow you to travel.
• Very little perks compared to other tech companies (no food, no gym, small discount, almost nothing can be expensed).
• For a place that calls itself inclusive, there are fewer than 10 women and no Black people in a team of ~100.

Don't focus only on delivering results to prove yourself worthy; also consider your team members and take their careers into account.