Amazon

Great place to get started. You can work with a lot of different technologies and get the Amazon stamp of approval on your resume.

My personal experience as an SDE Intern screened me from a lot of the downsides of working at Amazon, but I know many other fellow interns who had to work continuous extra hours (all the time, not just at push). In addition, the Amazon work model lends itself to being "on-call" – a.k.a. giving up your personal life for a week once every two months to support your team's software.

One manager and mentor assigned an intern a project that an SDE III declared "impossible". They then subsequently saw his efforts at completing his other project to push something useful out by the time he left as being inefficient and blamed him for the original project's failure. Don't worry, we interns won't forget that episode so easily.