Amazon

• Cutting-edge technology (at least in some groups)
• Excellent tooling/infrastructure for SDEs. Good (not too burdensome) processes.
• Smart engineers
• Good pay and decent benefits
• Stock doing well, so RSUs can be worth a lot (if you join at a low point in the stock price).

• Terrible on-call in almost every group. You will get very little sleep. All manner of abuse of employees is justified on the basis of Customer Obsession (employees are not treated as 'customers').

• Software quality is often sacrificed by managers to meet deadlines, and blame for failures is placed on engineers. The only way for an SDE to deal with a sev-2 is to kiss that long weekend goodbye and at least show you are working on the problem.

• Turnover rates in some groups are very, very bad, particularly some platform teams. Managers last less than six to twelve months. These folks typically leave Amazon because you can't transfer internally before 12 months are over. If you are an SDE, forget about stability and continuity.

• As AWS becomes successful, the platform teams are getting political at the manager/sr. manager levels. The organization runs on fear. You don't know when you'll get thrown under the bus. It's less of an issue at the SDE level.

• Expect to beg for productivity software and decent quality laptops/computer peripherals, or buy your own. This applies across Amazon.

Don't create a bureaucracy. Maintain a flat org structure like Google.

Hire managers who write code around 10% of their job. These types of people tend to spend less time playing political games.

Give developers some breathing room to be creative and work on hobby projects to expand their horizons.

Create dedicated operations teams to reduce on-call burden.

Don't overwork engineers and managers and tell them they are fortunate to be working for a company like AWS. It won't make up for sacrificing your best years with family, getting divorced, or losing your health. I've seen people going through all of these things at platform teams in AWS, due to the politics, stress, and fear.