Amazon

It's easy to make friends when you're under fire all the time. Most peers want to support each other because everyone knows you get no help coming on board, and yet are expected to get up-to-speed quickly. You'll walk away feeling like you're always watching your back, but in a twisted way, it helps you clean up your act and become a better employee and a happier person, grateful for the next job that comes along after the Amazon experience. It looks good on a resume.

There's much about Amazon that can't be attributed to other tech organizations. Amazon succeeds at establishing a unique culture (emphasis on 'cult').

Recruiters get frustrated at not being able to get candidates to follow through with the interview process once their friends at Amazon find out they are interviewing.

Phone screens are a big part of senior SDE's jobs because of the revolving door of employees. On-call rotation gets tighter because whenever someone is fired or leaves, the team needs to bring newbies up-to-speed.

On-call duties mean no outside activities 24/7 for one to two weeks unless you plan to take your laptop every place you go. For this reason, most people don't have a life outside Amazon.

Required to be online, working on a problem within 15 minutes of being paged means you are tethered to your computer for about one-quarter of your life.

New employees feel great about getting through the lengthy interview process but, in a few short months, realize what they've walked into.

Lots of turnover in general, but especially in management. Many are just freshly-minted MBAs who have little management experience and want to prove themselves by being good yes-men or henchmen. Often they blow it with good employees simply because of their incompetence at handling people.

Some managers are technical project managers with no people skills who also lack sufficient technical skills to be good tech managers. Because they lack technical skills on par with their staff, they can't participate in secondary on-call rotation, making the teams even more miserable.

The worst of the lot are managers with a little bit of technical knowledge who put on a good show. Managers rarely say thanks, except to give credit to engineers who are self-promoting, often taking credit for ideas their peers came up with.

The more desperate someone is to hang on to their job, the more they badmouth co-workers to gullible managers. Easy to manipulate newbie managers by camping out in their offices and making yourself sound knowledgeable and important. Hard for managers to detect BS if they don't understand the work of the people they are managing.

That leads to some really bad decisions that create outages and miserable on-call rotations.

Meetings become shout fests. Hours of meetings are devoted to people talking about things they don't really understand, hashing through screens full of data, staring at graphs.

Managers like to make you feel vulnerable and on your guard by picking on small things, like the style or length or content of your email. Makes you want to keep quiet and keep your ideas and opinions to yourself.

The more vindictive managers will go into your interview transcripts (yes, they keep data on everything and record whatever you say during your interviews) in order to throw things back at you later.

Why is this worse at Amazon? Because of the constant churn of management and staff. Average length of employment is 14 months.

Stock isn't really worth anything because your starting salary is about 10% less than your current salary. The recruiters will tell you that you'll catch up to your salary goal within two years, but the reality is that you'll probably quit before then. They count on that.

In fact, if you quit before your first anniversary, you will have to repay them a prorated amount of your signing bonus and all of your moving fees. If they decide you are not a fit, they will harass you until you leave so that you return the money and they don't have to pay unemployment compensation.

Total reliance on 'data' means that you can't make an intelligent argument stick unless you can come up with numbers, but more often your opinions are dismissed because everyone thinks they and everyone else are 'too smart' anyway.

Politics are rampant. Say the wrong thing to an ambitious senior manager, and you'll find yourself a target for the next culling.

It may be true that people are lining up outside the door to get into Amazon, but it's well known in Seattle (just read the press) that most of the people who want to work there are recent grads and other folks who think they might be able to take the pressure.

Employees will perform up to the level of whatever it is you think of them.

A "thank you" now and then will earn you better returns than unrelenting criticism.

Stop talking about how 'smart' everyone is and using that as an excuse for shoddy design and development.

Realize that no one is really learning anything they can take to any other job.

Stop treating employees as disposable and replaceable.