Amazon

There is a good salary, friendly colleagues, and lots of smart people about.

On-call is extremely unhealthy—expect frequent pages in the small hours of the morning to attend to legacy systems. The tech stack is outdated and tightly coupled, with significant friction around adopting modern frameworks or technologies, at least in service teams.

There is extensive meeting overhead, particularly six-pager reading sessions that consume multiple hours, sometimes for no good reason. Leadership Principles are often used to stifle productive debate rather than enable it.

A stack-ranking performance culture creates a competitive rather than collaborative environment. The promotion process emphasizes documentation and self-promotion as much as technical contributions. This leads to senior, or aspiring senior, roles finding ways to publicly meddle simply to show impact.

There are re-orgs and redundancies. Expect constant restructuring, focus shifting, and all the meetings, stress, and uncertainty that come with it.

Get out of the way and stop acting like you have meaningful decisions to make.