Amazon

NOTE: these are generalizations. Crappy managers and co-workers do exist.

• Smart and skilled people
• Highly motivated people
• During any type of "political debate," asking what is best for the customer usually gets people on the same page
• Easy to move around the company. In fact, it's encouraged.
• Things are done for a reason.
• Managers seem to be shit umbrellas rather than shit funnels.
• Due to the ridiculous scale of our systems, the one-in-a-billion edge case keeps us up at night.
• The promotions thing is done on a strict merit basis. If everyone in a department deserves a promotion, they all get it. There is no quota, but each promotion/review is heavily vetted with a bunch of management folks.
• I can drink on the job. We have weekly beer bashes and occasional nerf wars. It's a pretty good balance of youth and older, more experienced folks.
• Management is in tune with you and what you want to do/are doing. Most teams have weekly one-on-ones with their manager to just chat.
• Management is responsive and receptive.

• Your career growth is dictated by the opportunities made available to you on the team you're on.
• People switch teams about every two years. This is great, since it enables you to move around easily, but it also causes some turnover pains.
• Depending on the team, the pager thing can be annoying. But it's not that terrible, and many teams don't have a rotation. You do have folks in Ireland/India to take them during the night.

This is happening in some organizations throughout the company, but I think it would help to re-focus on what the role of a software engineer at Amazon should be.

Are they primarily coordinating projects and leading the design? Are they the actual people on the ground coding solutions? Are they just supporting current implementations / deprecating legacy code?

The role varies greatly throughout the company depending on the team. And if you're a new hire, you are leaving it up to luck as to whether