Amazon

Part of something big and generally good - Amazon is truly a customer-focused company that has brought some real value to the marketplace.

Ability to have large-scale impact in your work: stuff I've worked on has been deployed on hundreds of machines and handled $100 MM+ in business.

Colleagues are smart, pragmatic, and get things done. The colleagues here are some of the best that I've worked with in nearly 10 years in the industry.

Operational overhead - If you're lucky, you will be on a newer team without much operational overhead. Most likely, you'll be spending a significant portion of your time dealing with operational issues (pages, data backfills, investigating production alarms, resolving issues with other teams, etc.).

Work-life balance is hard to maintain.

Very little professional development - Aside from internal speaker sessions, there are few opportunities for professional growth and development.

Email - I have grown to despise Outlook more than ever before. How can people read this much email?

Development process - Some teams do Agile; some operate in a chaotic code-and-fix mode. There's little support for best practices across the company. If you are coming from outside and have done some reading or practice in software engineering processes, this place will feel like a gigantic step backwards.

HR - There is essentially no human resources department in this company. For almost all questions, you'll be talking to an email alias.

Ridiculous upper management escalations - Seriously, do you need to critique form layouts when they've been designed by a UI expert? And your background is in what, again?

Internal build tools and frameworks - Outdated, can be frustrating, little documentation.

If you want to reduce long-term costs, invest in some support for your engineering teams. Building a true engineering culture is tough, but worth the investment.