Amazon

• Good pay, probably at least the 75th percentile for the industry, probably closer to the 85th.

• Lots of office locations offer a good chance to work where you want to.

• Good resume boost; I had a much greater response rate to job applications after working at Amazon.

• Got to work on multiple teams doing entirely different things, meaning I got diversity in office locations, products I worked on, and culture.

• Lots of smart co-workers. I learned a ton about how tech is developed at scale. Bezos, of course, is a genius.

• The smaller offices that are relatively under the radar have much less "Amazonian" culture, which, sadly, is a good thing.

• Stock price is doing well, meaning RSUs are worth more. (Although if this means you are above your comp "target," they cut down on bonuses, etc. What a great thanks for all the hard work!)

• Very product oriented, meaning you get to more clearly see the business/product impact and motivations behind tech.

• Non-technical people are especially impressed when you say you work at Amazon. To a regular, non-tech person, Amazon seems more impressive than Google or Facebook, even though in the tech world, the latter are considered more impressive.

• Lack of empathy for employees or a sense of mission for doing good for the world. This has been a core cultural value from the start, as I learned from "The Everything Store" and other histories of Amazon (e.g., Steve Yegge's blog posts).

• Lots of small, employee-antagonistic policies: non-competes (I've seen interns have to sign 18-month non-competes), clawing back two-thirds of that year's 401K match when you leave (and it's already an industry low 2%), and a 5-15-40-40 vesting schedule with the 40s vesting as 20% per six months. Compare this to the standard 25-25-25-25 vesting schedule with monthly vesting after the first year.

• Rather stingy/subpar benefits compared to other big tech companies.

• Inadequate investment in onboarding. Google and Facebook have 4-6 week bootcamps for new engineers. Amazon has either a one-day orientation in Seattle (which sometimes they'll fly out people from other offices, sometimes not), or a subpar wiki you follow on your own.

• Lots of janky internal tooling that the company has not invested enough in. Again, I hear about the internal tooling at FB/Google and drool a bit. The downside of a tech company not run by engineers, though the upside is speed and business/product decisions are more emphasized, so you can learn more about that.

• Frugality Leadership Principle leads to inane things like paying interns six-figure annualized salaries but not paying $25 for a single checked bag on their flights or Lyfts to the airport, no free food but okay with highly paid engineers spending a long time going out to get lunch, sometimes subpar backpacks, a stingy $100 annual employee discount only after you spend $1000 on items shipped and sold from Amazon (which is less than half), no free Prime, etc.

• Warehouse employees are treated horribly (just Google it), and the little antagonistic policies make it clear they'd treat us engineers like that if they could. Dystopian when Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man.

• Corporate and bureaucratic at larger offices.

• Kool aid/cult-like obsession with Leadership Principles, which end up weaponizing them, since multiple LPs oppose each other ("Dive Deep" vs "Bias for Action"), so just about anything can be justified or opposed via the LPs. Not as bad as the cult around, say, consulting companies like McKinsey, but still kinda bad.

• Very inconsistent experiences across teams and orgs. Some teams I was on were absolutely wonderful and amazing; others were miserable. This is true to some extent in all big companies but much more so at Amazon. It really is roulette.

Adopt empathy as a core Leadership Principle. Customer Obsession is empathy for your customers, but the lack of empathy means high turnover and people, like me, who only use Amazon as a quick stepping stone to get to a company where they actually feel valued.

Stop being stingy (I mean, uh, "frugal"). It saves a trivial amount of money relative to the salaries being paid but seriously hurts morale. Consider offering:

• Free Prime
• Better employee discounts
• More swag and company events
• Catered lunch

There's a difference between true Frugality and this.