Amazon

High base salary and RSU benefits, along with a sign-on bonus and relocation bonus. So everything is in hand after deduction of tax and PF. There is no variable component. Amazon stock is performing excellently, and its price is the highest among all FAANG companies.

Everything is leadership principle driven. Full freedom is given to SDEs for innovation, to invent and simplify. You pitch an idea to the org, you design, and you own the service end-to-end. Amazon Prime was the idea of an SDE.

You will be solving some of the great impacting problems on a bigger scale and get to learn a lot every day. Amazon is a data-driven company; you will see a huge amount of data in almost every team.

You define and drive your own career path. Promotion is self-driven. If you show potential leadership principles in your deliverables, you will be promoted.

You will get a chance to work with some of the intelligent minds. Everyone is striving for excellence and executing "Learn & Be Curious." People will challenge you every time, starting from design reviews to implementation, choosing the best design patterns, and writing elegant code. You will grow as an engineer and explore all the latest technologies.

Things are evolving here every day, and every day is Day 1. Sometimes a service written two years back will be deprecated because change is constant here. You will never feel bored, and your learning will never stop.

You can change teams easily. Nobody can stop you from changing teams at Amazon, and people usually change their teams often. Amazon is all over the globe, so you can apply internally anywhere, and if you crack the interview, then nobody can stop you.

• RSU vesting period is 4 years. For the first 2 years, you'll only get 20% of stocks. Apart from salary, there are no other benefits like free food or a gym; you'll get free coffee and water only. But you can't complain since you're getting high base pay and other monthly bonuses, RSU.

• As an SDE, you'll have to do literally everything from infrastructure setup to writing automation tests. But thanks to AWS CloudFormation.

• Sometimes you'll have to face scaling challenges because of the growing amount of data and design flaws, and that will overclock your brain to think and come up with the best solution. It's also expected.

• There is a high bar of expectation from you. It's a highly competitive environment full of talented folks. People will use the "Have backbone, Disagree and Commit" leadership principle to do constructive criticism to arrive at the best decision and best solution. If you're weak-hearted and don't love to be challenged, then Amazon is not the place for you. This can help you in character development and growing as an individual.

• Work-life balance gets hampered because you'll be working with people from multiple time zones and geographical locations. But that's expected because you're getting a high paycheck. In most cases, you won't.

• On-call rotation: Although it totally depends on the operational excellence of your team and how well they have automated things, it can still be a pain point. My team receives 1-2 sev2s per month only.

Amazon is an ocean.