Amazon

Opportunities to do a wide variety of interesting projects due to the large scope of Amazon's business.

Large population of employees who have broad experience. Someone who knows something you need is probably on a relevant internal list.

Most people there are pretty nice. I know this sounds vague, but this place has a refreshingly low jerk count.

While the company puts customers first, the same isn't done for employees.

It's burdensome operationally. You'll have a pager rotation, which varies from awful to not too bad (other than you need to be able to log in at all times). There are tons of overhead tasks like hardware planning, permissions audits, and monitoring, etc. These take a substantial amount of time and are about as uninteresting as it gets in engineering.

The annual review process is political, confrontational, and even hostile. Everyone is stack-ranked. This is common in the industry, but Amazon takes it to a new level. Other managers in your division are motivated to push you down the ranking scale to get their own employees higher up. They have an incentive to trash you in the ranking meetings, so you have to watch your back. There's high manager turnover, so if you have a manager who is inexperienced at this process, you're at risk of being downgraded, which happens quite often. They don't care much because they'll just hire many more brand-new engineers. Nobody seems to care that the company is overwhelmingly staffed by relatively inexperienced engineers. If you're not inexperienced, you're expected to mentor more and more of them, and if you don't do that well, you will get a poor review.

Promotions are extremely difficult. Other than from SDE I to SDE II, it's quite difficult to get promoted. I know many top-notch engineers that have remained at the same level for 5-10 years.

People do get promoted, and many deserve it, but there's an art to it. You have to be fortunate enough to have a champion there who is willing to sponsor you and support you and do an incredible amount of documentation proving why you deserve it. They'll also need to rebut inevitable arguments against your promotion by other managers (see above). Lots of the time, the promotion won't happen. It's not explicitly quota-based, but that's how it works out.

Obviously, I have mixed feelings about Amazon. Ipet