Amazon

Very fast-paced environment.

Software Engineering is a first-class citizen.

Lots of offices in Europe.

Training and conferences.

In our group, you could buy tech books and expense them.

As a career stepping stone, a few years at Amazon looks good on the CV.

Median tenure for SDEs is around 1 year, possibly 2 years in the UK, from my experience.

You will not receive any bonuses or salary increases in your first 4 years. The people who came out on top in the review process received peanuts (e.g., 5 stocks that vest over 4 years). This may change as the AMZN stock price has plateaued, but don't bet on it.

Brutal HR practices around performance management.

Many SDMs (managers) are poor, even managers of managers. They make up for it by being aggressive and working their teams' heads off.

Managers have a lot of power and little accountability. If you want to transfer inside the company, a nasty but not banned practice is to put you on a performance improvement program. This prevents you from transferring, and they do not care that they crush your spirit. No soul.

The best work-life compromise that I have seen some people achieve is "work 10-12 hours a day, but enjoy the weekend."

During the weekend, the email chatter is at the same intensity as on a Friday. This includes upper management. And I don't mean that people work for an hour or two on Saturday; they are working the full Saturday and/or Sunday.

During the hackathon, I was asked by a team that I wanted to join if I was prepared to pull an all-nighter (i.e., 36 hours of straight-up coding). I don't think they did it in the end, but they had no problem doing this or asking.

Horrible internal engineering system (custom build, CI/CD, package management, code review, test infra, everything is custom). I'd say you take a 30% productivity hit in your first 6 months because of this.

Pay more taxes