Amazon

If you're a high performer and on a team with a good culture, this is a great place to be. Managers are encouraged to develop your career and promote on criteria that aim to be as objective as possible.

The people who work here are super sharp, and there are hard problems to solve. You'll learn a lot here and have a huge impact.

The pay is great but highly dependent on stock.

My managers have generally been supportive of me expensing technical books to help grow my skills. I also got to go to an expensive tech conference one time.

If you get unlucky, you might wind up on a team where the norm is to overwork, and you'll feel obligated to do the same.

Some projects are cared about more by leadership, and then extreme pressure cascades down to meet deadlines.

Sometimes you'll wind up doing more politics and negotiating than coding, like if you work on something that impacts or requires help from other teams.

Leadership is increasingly non-technical. Upper leadership is starting to seem more like 'most popular kid in high school' instead of 'smartest kid in high school'. And there are some complete, total jerks in leadership. Everyone in leadership there is brilliant, and some are kind, but some are really rule-by-terror style. This made me feel that I would never have what it takes to be in that level of leadership at Amazon.

I wish the company offered more time off.

Kindness, empathy, and collaboration are undervalued here. They are glaringly absent from the leadership principles, even after the recent new additions. As a result, people coming in who are abrasive and hostile don't learn any better, so long as they're 'delivering results'. Some of the people who I've seen promoted to L6, which is supposed to be a leadership and role model position, are such complete jerks that I feel something very important is missing from promotion guidelines.

Sometimes the tech work is really unglamorous, like a version upgrade that would be simple at a smaller company but is a year of bureaucracy and slogging through slow builds at Amazon, or having to use very outdated programming languages, or using weird internal frameworks rather than something industry standard.

Incentivize mentorship, teamwork, and empathy to make your teams healthier and happier. Push leadership to embody these in leadership principles.