Amazon

If you are a college hire, you will learn a lot, from discussing business requirements, writing tech specs, coding and testing, to deploying features to production. You will learn them all.

Projects are very cool sometimes, but get buried so much under processes and guidelines. Just let me build the thing already.

What else? What else is there? I don't know. Probably nothing else.

• Healthcare and Benefits: From what I hear from my friends working at other tech companies, Amazon pretty much has nothing. Just nothing.

• Work Equipment: Horrible. I am still using the MacBook from 2011 and not allowed to upgrade to a newer machine until 2017. I would have to pay out of my pocket for memory upgrades and switch from a normal hard drive to an SSD. Of course, all in the name of "Frugality." I am just not sure how it can be frugal when I have to spend a lot of time waiting for things to run and process while on the clock. And once upon a time, we were so looking forward to acquiring monitors from interns who were about to leave, because Amazon would refuse to give us two monitors of 22". Luckily, at least that's over.

• Performance Review and Salary: I have had many reviews so far, and it always seems subjective. Like April this year, I got "exceed" for engineer rating and "solid" for leadership principle, and I got <2% pay raise. Total compensation, stock included, goes down from last year. In other words, I get a pay cut for a good performance review. Who does that? Talked to my manager and HR; nothing they can do about it. And thanks to Glassdoor, I know that I am underpaid, even comparing to other engineers at the same level at the SAME company.

• Retention rate is very low. My department is considered one of the good ones in terms of work-life balance, and everybody is nice and such, but people keep leaving. Business keeps asking for projects to be built while we don't have enough resources and don't even care about operational support. They just want things to be done for their own promotion, then get promoted, and leave the burden behind. Engineers are quoted on their words about "rough/initial" estimations and get pressured onto those "promises" to get things done. Inexperienced engineers make those amateur mistakes all the time and burn themselves out. Engineers like me stay in the department because of promises about promotion and different and interesting projects, but of course, pay raises are kind of out of the question, but only for a very few people. (Perhaps I am not that good of an engineer. If so, why even bother rating me "exceed" in engineer performance many years in a row?)

• Technical challenge: Not much. Once you passed the first 1 or 2 years of learning as new hires, it pretty much dies down from there.

• Pager (it especially sucks if your team has less than 5 people. That means you would be on-call once a month or more).

• Mentor: Hit and miss. I am fortunate to have some very great mentors, but my friends seem to have the complete opposite of the spectrum. He has to learn everything, plays nice with his mentor, although that mentor is not even helpful.

• Managers and some engineers tend to present Amazon's problems in a very engineer way: it is not perfect and very challenging, but there will always be room for improvement, and you can contribute to that. Sure, it's possible, if only you work their days and nights, weekends included, to get your work done and achieve those goals.

You probably ask why I am still working there after so many complaints I made above. Well, I love my teammates. They are some of the best engineers I have had a chance to work with. They are all moving on now. I am the last man standing. Prepping for the interviews now. If you are working for Amazon, move on, NOW. If you plan to work for Amazon, at least ask for a ton of money or a very special project. Last word, just get out.

• Having so many diverse projects without any focus is not a good thing.
• Postponing tech mandates to deliver some milestones will bite everyone eventually.
• Dealing with your teammates to make sure that everyone is happy is your job. That's what you get paid for; not for making everyone fight each other and getting paid.
• Lack of communication and giving out empty promises to keep engineers around might work in the short term, but words will go around. Good luck moving to a new team or new company where your old engineers share their experiences with others. The tech community is pretty small. It will come back and befriend you very soon.