Amazon

A lot of opportunities. If you're an overachiever, you can find things that need to be done and will be able to make an impact. Amazon also values ownership of the product, so you will be able to take real pride in your work and you will be able to talk directly with people in other teams easily to get things done.

Learning: There are a lot of talks, events, mentorships, video, and manual resources at your disposition to become better at what you do.

Team: You'll work with very capable people with deep knowledge in IT who will make you reconsider your approaches. The people are very direct when they say things to you, which minimizes the time you spend in discussions. Some people might not like it, but I did. Time is a precious resource, so meetings were usually short and direct to the point.

There were also company-organized events to mingle, and there are always opportunities to have fun, like foosball, ping pong, or playing Humans vs. Zombies.

The benefits are really good too, with a six-digit salary, RSU, relocation, signing bonus, and medical insurance.

The work-life balance isn't too bad either, although expect to work around 45 hours a week on average, plus on-calls (which, in my team, wasn't that bad).

Overall, I feel I improved a lot as a person and professional by working at Amazon. It was the first company I felt really committed to, and the core values are really lived at the company. Your experience highly depends on the team you are in, but I would certainly recommend working at the company.

• The offices (at least San Luis Obispo's): Since Amazon considers frugality a core value, forget about nice fixtures or beautiful Google/Facebook/(add tech company here) offices. It will be the simplest thing that will allow you to work there. I had some complaints about the cleaning too: in my almost year and a half, no one cleaned the office's desks.

• The evaluation process and competitiveness: There are things called "goals" that you have to satisfy in order to progress on your career at Amazon. There's also a job description for each of the positions. And there's also feedback from your peers. Besides that, there's no formal evaluation of your skills or how you meet your manager's expectations. At the end, unless you are a clear overachiever (say, a rockstar), you will fall into some grey area, in which your manager's opinion of you will be the only determinant on whether you stay or not.

At Amazon, you compete against your peers. You might be really good, but if you are below your team's average performance (either technically or what they call "core values" evaluation, i.e., soft skills) in your manager's eyes (no additional objective measure), you are a candidate for a PIP. And that happens to an important percentage of Amazon Software Developers every year (I cannot disclose the number).

Fix the evaluation process to include more objective measures and avoid comparing each dev to their peers.