Amazon

You need to be a good software engineer to work here. You will not be able to slip through and not get things done. If you are competent, however, there is a lot of freedom with how you get to approach your work. I often work less than 8 hours because I can get everything I need done in less time; your experience may vary, though.

• Pay and benefits are great.
• Lots of freedom and independence.
• Fast-paced.
• Great resume addition.

• Lots of acronyms to learn. It will take a while before you even know what people are saying half of the time because there are so many, and they are constantly used in both written and verbal communication.

• Tons of systems to learn. There are a ton of systems here that work together to make Amazon function. You'll need to learn a decent amount about each of them to really understand how things work.

• On Call. You'll likely need to be on-call for up to a week at a time periodically. This means you can get paged at any time if something isn't working correctly, and will need to fix it. This can happen at any time, even while you're sleeping.