Amazon

The Seattle office has a casual atmosphere and a convenient urban location, surrounded by dozens of restaurants, bars, and cafes within walking distance.

They have a cafeteria with many different food options, including a number of healthy choices. Vending machines also offer healthy snacks.

There is no dress code – "wear whatever you want" – and dogs are allowed at work.

There are no fixed core hours, and nobody cares when you are at your desk, as long as you can get work done.

Amazon employees are given a lot of latitude and freedom, and they are not micromanaged.

Amazon is extremely generous with relocation assistance and will move you to Seattle, all expenses paid.

Once there, you'll have the chance to work with smart people and on interesting technical problems. You'll have the latitude to solve them any way you like.

Amazon recruiters may claim that their employees enjoy reasonable work/life balance, but don't believe a word of it! Amazon is a high-pressure environment designed to pile impossible demands on employees and get them to compete with their coworkers in order to squeeze out as much productivity as possible. You are just a disposable cog in the machine. Once you're burnt out, you're easily replaceable, and will be replaced by a constant stream of new hires. The whole system is designed to work that way.

Expect to work 60-80 hours a week. If you move across the country to work for Amazon, expect to be saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt in relocation repayment obligations if you have any thoughts of quitting.

The one good piece of news is that if you hold your ground and insist on maintaining good work/life balance, nobody will tell you that you have to work certain hours – you will just be put on a performance improvement plan and fired for "poor performance" – and then you will probably be offered a severance agreement where you are released from your repayment obligations. Expect to be put through hell in the meantime, though.

Oh, and as far as learning anything from your smart coworkers goes, don't count on it. Amazon has a deliberately Darwinian culture that encourages competition and discourages knowledge-sharing and collaboration. Don't expect to receive any training to perform the functions of your job or any assistance from your coworkers, and expect most of your questions to be met with "go read the Wiki" – which, by the way, will probably be out of date and was probably written by somebody who no longer works there, because Amazon has one of the highest employee turnover rates of any large, successful company.

The entire time I was there, I spent half of every day fighting a broken build system that could go wrong in any one of 100 different ways, all of which were listed on a Wiki with arcane instructions for resolving them – and every once in a while, it would break in some other way that wasn't listed. Nobody bothered to put in the effort to fix any of this, because everyone was more focused on completing their own projects than on common infrastructure. As far as management was concerned, who cares if developers have to work long hours to deal with this? They're smart – they can figure it out.

You might develop innovative solutions to difficult technical problems at Amazon, but you're equally likely to bang your head against the wall until you somehow manage to reinvent the wheel – perhaps in one of the least efficient ways possible, one which may be barely adequate. Expect to have to reinvent the wheel over and over again, due to the lack of knowledge-sharing and brain drain from having so many people move on after barely working there for over a year.

With so many people so poorly trained for the duties of their job, competing with each other instead of working together, and making the kinds of bad design decisions that come from working at a death-march pace, it's amazing that anything works at Amazon at all. The only reason it may work at all is the constant stream of new college hires.

They do not offer nearly high enough pay to justify putting up with this (I was not making any more than at my previous position in a smaller, less expensive city). I was sorely disappointed after moving to Seattle for this. I not only learned twice as much, but also got twice as much done in half the time at both my previous job and the next one after Amazon – all the while enjoying better work/life balance and a consistent 40-hour workweek.

Amazon is destroying the culture and fabric of Seattle, a city I used to like. Seattle used to be a laid-back, counter-cultural city with liberal attitudes but a cost of living much lower than San Francisco. Amazon is creating a housing crunch that has caused rents to spike to the point where they are almost not even affordable to tech workers, and its antisocial attitudes are seeping into the general culture of the city now. Ironically, the company I moved here to work for is destroying many of the things that drew me to move here in the first place.

Knowledge-sharing is not the enemy.

Amazon employees would greatly benefit from practices like pair programming, which are actively discouraged there. This would greatly cut down on ramp-up time by allowing employees to learn from the experience of others.

High turnover is bad and creates brain drain. Amazon should create a better work environment that makes employees want to stay and should reconsider its practice of hiring tons of people, only to fire a bunch of them later.

Working at a death march pace is not conducive to good design decisions or good product quality in the long run. More likely, it leads to a bunch of hacks built on top of hacks and a product that is unmaintainable.

There is not an infinite supply of new hires to replace the people who are leaving, and the current model is unsustainable. Word is getting out about what it's like to work at Amazon, and there are only so many bright engineers willing to put up with this.

Amazon is not going to be able to continue expanding endlessly, raising the hiring bar the whole while. Eventually, the supply of willing and qualified candidates will dry up.

Be a good corporate citizen.

People move to a city like Seattle because of its livability and cultural character. Those things need to be respected and supported. If you turn Seattle into another Silicon Valley, people will stop wanting to move here.