Amazon

Good camaraderie among the engineers. Very customer-focused. You can pretty much kill any bad idea with the "customers will hate it" argument.

Agile program management means you'll keep up with what your team members are doing on a daily basis.

Nearly everything is client/service architecture. Which, if your team does it well, allows you to do whatever is best for your solution to your problem area without having huge migration issues with your clients.

Generally, managers are too busy to have those useless weekly meetings. (If you have daily ones, why have a regular weekly one? You can always schedule a topic meeting to go over design issues, etc.)

Good and getting better support for bicycling to work.

• Bike cages
• Showers
• Lockers
• Towels

Discount on buying stuff on their website.

On call. Nearly every engineering team has an on-call rotation, so count the number of members and divide the number of days in a year by that number. That's the number of days you'll be on "house arrest" because a page must be answered within 20 minutes any time, day or night, when you are on call.

There seem to be more frameworks than teams. Everyone wants one, and they tend to get imposed on your project in order to interface to some other needed service. Then the company drops support for it, and you'll have to migrate your service.

It is difficult to do volunteer coding, i.e., help with your favorite freeware system, as you need approval from legal. It's not impossible, but it's not straightforward either.

Annual reviews tend to emphasize the negative versus the positive. That is, you have peer feedback, but your manager can pick and choose among the comments to either promote you or squash you. There is very little opportunity to complain about it via HR.

We need to train junior managers. The company tends to promote engineers, grade 3, into first-line management, but then doesn't train them.