Amazon

• Good pay
• Easy to move between teams
• You can find any project/technology under the sun
• Unlimited opportunities to make an impact and learn
• Good work/life balance (depending on the team)

The bar for SDEs has slipped so low; for example, hiring engineers who barely know how binary search works. Actually, the bar for all roles has slipped. You will encounter a lot of people with questionable intelligence in your day-to-day.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease: only those who complain or brownnose get promoted, not the people who actually should be promoted.

Resource-strapped, you will be expected to do three other jobs in addition to yours (especially in AWS, avoid it like the plague) and somehow deliver precisely on time on ETAs.

All of the good managers left a long time ago.

Leadership principles once meant something, and I'll admit I kind of liked them, but now they only apply to lowly SDEs (never to managers) and are only thrown in when convenient to justify someone's point of view.

The compensation review process is completely opaque, and they are getting stingier every year without much justification.

On-call can be brutal.

Each team at Amazon is like its own kingdom, meaning that getting cooperation to integrate code or align on deliverables is almost always a battle.

Super hierarchical; everything (dates, requirements, policies, what you will work on, etc.) is handed down from on high with little ability for engineers to give input. Extreme emphasis is placed on a person's level: "a lowly Level 5 questioning a Level 6? Impossible!"

Diversity means nothing and is only paid lip service. In my more than half a decade career at Amazon, I was always the only person of my ethnicity on my floor, and I worked in several buildings during my tenure.