Amazon

Fast-paced. Lots of motivated and intelligent coworkers. The culture is customer and data-driven, rather than “PM-driven” like other companies that hire software engineers.

Good management will make sure you’re spending time on meaningful projects.

Work is interesting, and you can easily get sucked into putting a lot of time at work at the sacrifice of outside life and relationships. You’ll usually get rewarded for it, though.

The culture here is more straightforward than others in the area. Shy, anxious, neurotic people will have a hard time.

Bad management can suck the life out of you, so you have to be quick to identify a bad situation and move on.

Managers make or break their teams, and the long-term life of a project.

Keep the good folks, and quickly weed out the toxic ones.