Amazon

You can gain knowledge and experience of being a part of a huge corporation and ambitious projects.

There are a lot of smart people to learn from.

• Rush - it is all about deadlines. First, unrealistic deadlines are set, then all corners are cut to meet them.

• Horrible code quality - be prepared to spend most of your time going through piles of rotten legacy spaghetti code. There is no culture or mechanisms to keep code quality high.

• There are many great engineers at Amazon, and many mediocre and bad ones.

• No time to experiment or learn.

• Broken promotion process - promotions do not follow your good work. If you want to get promoted, you need to spend time learning the promotion process and how to make your work look good for promotion. Also, most importantly, you need others to like you.

• Huge bureaucracy - everything is very formal and slow.

• Decline in salary - after 4 years at the company, salary falls from a cliff (mine is down about 30%).

• Fix the hiring process: Don't ask coding questions; you can teach a monkey to code. Ask engineering questions instead.

• Fix the promotion process: Make promotions follow results.

• Aim for long-term success, not meeting the next deadline.

• Pay off that technical debt!

• Get people really involved and trusted.

• Look at humans, not head count.