Amazon

Amazon has a wide variety of products to work on. E-commerce, AWS, Amazon Chime, Alexa, etc., and this allows team members to work on different things.

Good structured ways of doing things and well-defined processes for conducting interviews, performance management, data-point driven promotion, etc.

Quarterly promotion cycles up to L6, which means that even if you miss a little thing here or there, you don't have to wait for 6 months or a year.

The concept of BR is unique, and there is a wide variety of it (Hiring BR, CM BR, COE BR, Infoset BR, UX BR...).

An amazing document-writing culture where things are data-driven.

If you are joining as an external candidate, please note that Amazon's hiring bar is different from the internal promotion bar.

So in the hiring process, they will insist you need 10 years for L6, 15 for L7, etc. But internally, there are folks with L6 at 5 years, L7 at 8-10 years. The hiring bar is also better than 50% at a particular level, but the promotion bar is only the entry level of a bracket.

This means that you will slowly move from imposter syndrome to Dunning-Kruger as you work with internally grown colleagues.

For external hires, cultural adjustments will also take some time.

Overall, you may end up growing slowly than your internal peers, even after clearing the so-called 50% bar.

If you are working in non-Seattle locations, especially eastern economies, there are chances that some of the management have made their way in through middle-level companies, and they are making big money as Amazon has expanded big time with bloated egos.

Providing insights to them is not easy.

"Learn and Be Curious" leadership principle is regularly violated if you are coming from outside and have suggestions or opinions.

You will hear things to the tone of "This is what we do at Amazon."

Amazon has met with lots of success recently, but from a bar perspective, they are equivalent to other companies like Microsoft, PayPal, Adobe, etc., despite what they tell you.

Please respect talent from outside. Once they are hired, they are part of the company, and their opinions should be respected.