Amazon

You will learn a lot. This company has some of the most challenging, most exciting, and most technologically engaging problems I have ever had to solve, and I learned an amazing amount in the time I was there.

You will find something in their culture to value. The principles of leadership are impressive, and the way they interplay with each other actually informs how the company operates.

Your employment will be a blessing or a condemnation, depending almost entirely on the team for which you work.

I was in Builder Tools on the deployment engine team, and in two-and-a-half years my life was hell. I was forever understaffed, overworked, and unsupported.

My manager provided no coaching, no guidance, and no support, except on performance "reviews," which were almost entirely full of new information. He was forced out of management, but not before ruining my chances of keeping my job.

When I brought the matter up to HR and said I was being unfairly treated, their direct answer was, and I quote, "if we did something about this, we'd set a precedent of letting employees dispute their reviews, and then we couldn't manage." After that, I had no interest in fighting for my job, since it was clear the company had no interest in fighting for me.

Stop the churn.

Yes, you need to raise the bar over time, but you do so by actually caring about your SDE1s, instead of scooping up more college kids into the hopper to be run through the machine.

Fix your recruitment process. Most of your new hires are college applicants, which means they don't know what it means to be well-treated by a company yet. This means when you don't treat them well, they don't have anything against which to compare.

Promote internally. It's easier to leave the company and come back a grade higher than it is to get promoted.

Valuing your customers at the expense of your employees is not customer-obsessed; we shop here too.

Make sure "earns trust of others" and "vocally self-critical" are a full peer to "is right, a lot."