Amazon

There are very few teams in the company where the managers are helpful to employees and have a good work culture. However, these teams are so rare in such a big company and hard to find that I chose to consider this company as having a toxic work culture with no work-life balance.

1. Useless review tool - One of the several decisions taken after the NYT article was to change the annual review process and use a new review tool. However, last year, stack ranking of employees was done (and compensation was adjusted accordingly) even before this tool was open.

Your stack rank and compensation are completely reliant on your manager, despite what they publicize. There is no way for employees to formally provide or get feedback anytime they want.

1. Many organizations were not supposed to hire SDE 1s. However, "Hiring and developing the best" is still a criteria for your annual performance review. The only way you can get a data point for this is to mentor an intern, and with the hiring freeze across multiple organizations, this was an unachievable goal for most SDE 1s.

2. Worst employee benefits I have seen for such a big company. When asked, their usual response is that the company gives out the best compensation instead, so the employee can choose whatever benefit they want for themselves. However, this company doesn't compare to its competitors in terms of compensation (and the competitors have better benefits too).

The past couple of years may be an exception due to the increase in stock price, but that soon is going to change.

1. They take frugality to the extreme in areas they shouldn't. It takes at least 2 months for you to get any desk accessories and longer if you want a standup desk. If employee productivity is not their highest priority, I wonder what is.

They expect you to do on-call work, but you have to purchase your own accessories like batteries for your pager, DisplayPort adapters to extend your laptop, etc.

1. Speaking of work environment, their high-density seating is the worst to focus on work. All the people I know (including myself) stay in the office only for meetings and work from home in the evenings to actually do work. They won't even provide noise-canceling headphones.

Some teams are lucky because their managers reimburse for the headphones, but this is up to the team.

1. They started a tool that asks you a question every day to collect regular feedback from employees (and possibly profile them). However, there is no transparency in what the collected feedback is or what kind of decisions they take based on it.

The individual results are supposed to be confidential, but I have heard of instances where HR met with employees based on their feedback.

1. They say that they hire the best of people who raise the bar for the entire company, but if you want to transfer internally, you have to go through interviews again with the new team. Also, the moment you apply for a new team in the internal job portal, your manager will be notified of it.

Hence, many people go through informal interviews before applying formally in the job portal in fear of their managers giving negative feedback for all the bad stuff in their team.