Amazon

Amazon.com is a great place to get started in your career.

It will teach and challenge you at the same time.

Project work can be challenging (5% of the time).

The kind of people who work in the company are very smart and will keep you on your toes.

The customer centricity is a strong guiding force in the company, and it is reflected in everything the company does.

Amazon.com has been slowly degrading as a great place to work. It took several years for me to notice, however, there it is.

Project deadlines are insane (95% of the time).

The company's customer-centrism works against it as a workplace, as company employees are not customers. Your needs come secondarily to the customer. Which means:

• No perks,
• No philanthropy,
• Small raises if any,
• Low-powered equipment,
• And a general lack of care by upper management for the operations load generated by rushing projects out the door. (So that pager going off in the middle of the night? Yeah... tell me that isn't irritating at 4 in the morning.)

Treat your employees as customers.

Increase the number of available career levels to make it more granular.

Make the promotions process transparent and deterministic. Remember, these people you employ like predictable things in their lives.