Amazon

Pay is good. Non-idiotic approach to engineering. I learned a lot about engineering in my year here. Pay is pretty good. Seattle is a nice place to live, I think. Teaches you that there's more to life than work by virtue of shoving in your face how distasteful workaholics are.

The company actively encourages everyone to treat each other like inhuman tools and be crappy to each other. Each leadership principle basically reads "be a crap to the people sitting next to you" or "be super arrogant."

The company actively encourages everyone to treat each other like inhuman tools.

Everyone is a tool.

Code quality is very low. Interviews to get in are pretty easy as far as coding skills and technical knowledge go. I had coworkers writing JavaScript who didn't know what the DOM is, coworkers that didn't understand how the internet works. I was working on a core service of AWS too.

The way work is distributed basically goes as follows: everyone waves their genitalia at each other, and whoever is most assertive gets their work of choice.

I tried to be nice to people because I naturally tend to put the needs of people sitting next to me over my own, and I ended up with piles of everyone else's crapwork on my desk. This never happened to me at previous employers.

Low-quality assignments, low-quality work by peers, and everyone being kind of mean to you gradually drains all of the joy of work right out of your soul. People aren't as bad as in the NYTimes article by any means, but even people slightly/subtly being crappy to you takes a toll on your experience as a human being.

I'm used to work being something like: "Hello __. We have X work, something you are skilled in, we are not skilled in, and you're at least vaguely interested in doing. Have a crack at it, why don't you, for some money."

At Amazon, it's: "Hey __. Here's a room full of kind of mediocre engineers that want to stab you in the back and crap on you at worst, and not give a crap about you in any way and use you as a tool at best. We have a bunch of crap that needs doing, but we're just going to throw you in here and see what ends up happening to you."

Be more like other places, please.