Amazon

There are constant challenges, driven by the customer obsession culture. We really strive to deliver the best thing for our customers. The people that I work with are team players, very smart, some of them even inspirational, and this keeps me enthusiastic.

There are clear promotion guidelines, your management encourages career growth, and there is enough flexibility and opportunities if you are not satisfied with your current team.

I've also made a lot of great friends in here. There are opportunities to meet people and befriend them.

Amazon kind of takes from you as much as you are willing to give.

Some people choose to do a lot of overtime work, and this is not healthy in the long term, nor properly appreciated by the management. Some managers do not realize that the planning is too aggressive and the goals cannot be met in the normal working timeframe. This very possibly happens because devs do not complain about it but actually hide it, in the desire to come across as extremely productive, even if this means working nights.

Also, aggressive planning and deadline meeting leads to technical debt. Sometimes, we get the time to fix it afterwards, but not always. We are often requested to deliver feature after feature on a poorly written codebase.

Also, there is not enough time spent on benchmarking new technologies. This might actually help us with frugality and productivity.

Pay attention to the reasons why aggressive goals are met. It is most likely because of a few people who do a significant amount of overtime work.

Appreciate those efforts openly, but try to change the strategy. Otherwise, burnout will quickly affect everyone and lead to turnover.

Also, it's really important to allocate time to refactor poorly written codebases. Otherwise, it will become increasingly difficult to continue adding value.

Also, allocate more time to prototyping and exploring new technologies. The world around us is constantly changing; let's benefit from what others are building.