Amazon

"Customer centric" is an understatement.

Innovation (AWS, Kindle, Instant Video, etc.).

Freedom to move around and work for various teams and organizations.

Amazing development, build, and deployment tools.

Countless new projects and the freedom to make a huge impact.

Smart people.

• Employees are not treated as well as customers.

• Horrible IC promotion process. Getting promoted is a joke, especially for individual contributors at higher levels. Talent is just a minor factor. At most 20% is within your control; the rest is pretty much random luck: Is your manager willing to do the hard work? Is your manager experienced enough to get you promoted? Is anyone else getting promoted on your team? Does your organization promote engineers regularly? Who do you know? Who does your manager know? Did you have more than one manager during the last review cycle? Did your team go through a re-org? Was the project you worked on this review period "visible" enough? The company is shooting itself in the foot by not fixing this problem.

• Pager duty. Depending on the team you're on, this can have a very negative impact on your work-life balance. Your overall comp should be at least 20% higher than elsewhere to make up for on-call rotations, crazy load, unrealistic expectations, and at times brutal and uncaring management.

• "Frugal" is a euphemism for cheap. It's way overdone.

Treat employees like customers.

Fix the promotion process.