Amazon

• Compensation
• Career building resume addition
• If you land with the right team, it can be an incredible experience
• Work from home
• PTO
• Scale

If you land with the wrong team, it can be a terrible experience.

Career advancement can be very political.

Suck up to the right people, move 100 mph when people are watching and 1 mph when they're not, be unhelpful to your peers, make your peers look bad... Do all of this and you'll look great and be promoted.

If instead you focus on working hard, being helpful, being a team player, and moving at a good pace regardless of who's watching or the visibility, then you won't get promoted.

Due to the size of the company, there can be a massive difference in the health of a team, from one to the next.

Spend more time ensuring that all teams have good management, a positive culture, and healthy competition.

One of my biggest issues as an SDE during my time at Amazon was that a very good way to get ahead was to be unhelpful and sometimes intentionally trip up your peers so you look better than them. Career advancement should be about the individual's capabilities compared to the bar, not compared to other individuals. This is a cultural imperfection, and those can be difficult to fix.