Amazon

The initial signing bonus is good. Most people start off with a 30-40k signing bonus that spreads out over two years. Not bad, huh?

For software engineers, there are weekly PoA talks and learning series that will help you improve your knowledge and know what other teams are doing.

Working here looks good on your resume. Although slowly declining, working at Amazon is still a big deal, sort of!

Pet-friendly, urban campus.

Access to world-class Principal Engineers.

Horrible work-life balance. Some teams do a "death march" for months together, during which time it is expected that you put in long hours (50+ easily).

SDMs at Amazon are horrible. Most of them have no people management skills. I have known managers who were promoted despite having 80% attrition in their teams. No kidding.

Amazon, for whatever reason, does not file Green Cards for immigrant Level 4 employees. The justification given by the legal department about not meeting the criteria is fishy, especially since Microsoft and Expedia are able to get the process going for Level 59 employees. L59 at MSFT is equal to Level 4 at Amazon.

SDE-1s are expected to demonstrate SDE-2 behavior for 5 months to be considered for promotion. This is something managers tell their employees every week in 1-on-1s. Often, SDE-1s are not given enough opportunities to demonstrate such behavior, i.e., good projects to work on, etc.

On-call (for engineers) is basically paying the price for your predecessor's mistakes. There is zero documentation. Tribal knowledge is rampant. Due to constant churn and internal attrition, you will end up going on-call once a month, which is like 12 weeks a year. Basically, this means for an entire quarter of the year, you will be doing everything except for writing code.

Finally, the feeling of camaraderie is missing. There are no free lunches or free happy hours. Team-building events are unheard of. You will be looked down upon as a weirdo if you try to get too friendly with your teammates. The expectation is to prevent social cohesion.

Finally, for SDEs, there is no career growth after hitting the SDE-2 mark. Less than 2% of engineers make it from SDE-2 to SDE-3 level.