Amazon

• Solving truly "never-been-done-before" engineering problems regularly.
• Looks amazing on your resume/LinkedIn, especially if you're early-career.
• TC is highest in the industry: Easy to negotiate better comp during the offer process because they're willing to pay top of band if they think it will make the difference on whether you go with them versus somewhere else.

• WLB at many teams is awful: Often understaffed for their workload and on-call rotation. On-call shifts can be extremely hectic in teams supporting a lot of customer-facing infrastructure.

Managers lie through their teeth about "not wanting you to work more than 8 hours a day" but assign so much work and schedule so many meetings during core 9-5 hours that you're forced to put in 12+ hour days constantly and work weekends just to stay off the PIP chopping block. Not the place to be unless you're young and single with few commitments besides work.

• Onboarding/Training/Documentation is either nonexistent or unhelpful most of the time, and the ramp-up period is either extremely short or nonexistent at many teams: This makes Amazon not a good place to learn the ropes right out of school when combined with the PIP culture. "Git gud fast or git out fast" is the name of the game here.

• Lots of Amazon proprietary tooling used that doesn't transfer to anywhere else experience-wise: They use their own crappy cobbled-together knockoff versions of Git, CI/CD pipelines, and Linux. Other more niche Amazon-internal dev tooling is usually half-finished and completely undocumented.

• Customer Obsession used as an excuse for bad engineering practices: Lots of feature-driven development, tons of tech debt from mountains of hacky quick-fix solutions that are never improved into something more robust or maintainable. Documentation is never updated even when major changes are made, so lots of key knowledge is passed on purely by word of mouth.

• PIP culture: Undermines collaboration, especially between peers. Destroys trust in both peer-to-peer and manager-report relationships. Turns everything into a blame game and makes it so teams aren't really teams. One vindictive manager can easily railroad you out for a single minor mistake or failure and look good doing it.

• Benefits Besides Pay Are Awful: RSU vesting schedule is designed to screw you over. Medical/dental benefits cover the bare minimum, in-network providers are bottom of the barrel. ExpressScripts online pharmacy won't ship or cover many common medications. You will have to probably empty out your HSA and dip into your savings for many common prescriptions and routine procedures.

Invest more time in better org and team-specific onboarding.

Stop treating employees like they are disposable. You will run out of quality devs and end up in a death spiral.

Offer better benefits.

Fix the WLB issues in a meaningful way. Actually enforce no-meeting days and bans on pinging people who aren't on-call outside core work hours. Be realistic about the workload and expectations. Don't cater exclusively to early 20s new-grads with no life, committed relationships, or obligations outside of work.