Amazon

For a software engineering position, I would recommend joining if:

1. You are a new grad fresh out of school. The learning curve is steep; you will quickly be trained as a qualified employee. There are lots of internal resources to study if you are curious, and internal networking and team transfers are easy.

2. You haven’t worked with a “big name” company before and you want that name on your resume.

3. You don’t have kids and can’t find better jobs.

Overall, the upsides are that you can work with lots of smart people, the perks are good, you can make large impacts, and there are transparent promotion opportunities for entry-level positions. Internal transfers are easy if you want to explore within the company.

Works are very boring, lots of ops work with a legacy codebase.

Possible long hours.

Again, many ops work; on-call can be tiring.

If you land on a team with a toxic manager, you want to transfer out as soon as possible.

Overall, it’s just a job; no sense of belonging.

You engineers are not just numbers on a spreadsheet; pay more attention to their feedback.