Amazon

• Amazon offers semi-competitive offers.
• Interviews are generally easier than Facebook or Google.
• Perks are not "bad," although not amazing either.
• If you don't like your team, you can always transfer to a different team in a relatively short period.
• Most non-AWS orgs are switching to using the native AWS platform rather than its in-house legacy web services. This is good for resume building, as AWS usage is marketable in general.
• The notorious "Leadership Principal" can be either a curse or a blessing. From a career perspective, though, it does a good job of turning shy, non-vocal engineers into vocal, can-do engineers who can lead. The industry seems to be abundant of the former.

Summary: I think Amazon's good qualities pale in comparison to other competitors, but objectively it isn't as bad as the young'uns make it out to be. It's more so that companies like Google and Facebook are raising the bar in employee satisfaction, whereas Amazon hasn't changed too much because it doesn't really drive up its profits. Instead, what they do to incentivize employee retention is to give a stock vesting plan that rewards you exponentially near the end of your 3-4 year term. This means you don't really get squat for leaving within the first year, but in the later years, you get rewarded handsomely.

• They are stingy on pay, as millions of others would probably say (unless your offer came from negotiation wars).
• The "Leadership Principal" can actually make teams more toxic and overall just unpleasant to maintain.
• Some orgs have unfulfilling grunt work as an engineer and are not great for career growth. AWS is no better either unless you're working for a niche team.
• Work-life balance can be a hit or miss depending on your org and team. In my case, this wasn't an issue, but it is safe to say that Amazon as a whole doesn't really care about your work-life balance that much.
• Perks are again, not "bad," but really lackluster compared to other competitors. You don't even get Prime membership for free, and you get a discount code that only works on select products.

Summary: Amazon's culture is like a double-edged sword. The leadership principles can make you grow as an engineer in soft skills and also as a leader. The cost of that is the breeding of "toxic" cultures, where everyone is only looking out for themselves and feels the need to step on someone else's shoes because it's an area for growth. This eventually leads to everyone having an "alpha" mindset towards each other for the sake of being "alpha"; even if there isn't a visible need for improvement, teams create one anyway.

Another thing to mention is the work-life balance. In my opinion, the idea of having a perfect work-life balance WITH a career-rewarding role is extremely rare. Typically, you would either end up with a role that does a lot of good for your resume but with an intense amount of hours per week, or a role that doesn't do much for your resume but has a perfectly nice work-life balance. In other words, it's not impossible to attain good skillsets or have a reasonable work-life balance here – it just boils down to your luck on teams.

Last thing is compensation – most people only stay up to the 4-year mark because that is when their stock vesting plan pays off. The sign-on bonus usually runs out before the halfway mark of the vesting plan. Once your stock vesting is done, you may be eligible for a pay refresh, but at that point, it's probably better off joining another company if you want higher pay.

You raise the bar for your customers, yet you don't raise the bar for your employees, who are also your customers. Do better.