Amazon

Amazon pays top-of-the-market salaries and is very fair and transparent when it comes to compensation.

Good team diversity.

In most cases, SysDev as a role does not involve any feature development or design work.

Work-life balance can get pretty bad in some teams.

Peers are some of the most toxic people I've ever seen, trying to set up others to fail every chance they get. There is a complete sink-or-swim culture, and most people don't want to help new joiners onboard to save themselves from getting into the bottom percentile, which gets PIP'd.

Vertical movement/promotions are very difficult, as promotions require peer feedback, which most people are not inclined to give due to stack ranking. In most cases, people create over-engineered solutions just to land a promotion, as the leveling criteria is always misinterpreted.

SysDev as a role is one of the worst and poorly managed roles in the company. Most SysDevs are part of Support orgs, working with Support Engineers for all the grunt work development teams don't want to do. While on paper it is considered a parallel role to SDE with 75% of SDE base salary, the actual work in most teams is either mundane infra migrations or company-wide campaigns which involve minor config changes here and there.

Getting anything done in this company is a challenge. There is so much process and politics, it will make you miserable. A lot of times, removing a single line of code will take weeks, as people don't simply respond to others here for reviews, especially when working as away teams, which is the norm for most SysDevs. You will be treated as a second-class citizen as a SysDev compared to SDEs, who command much more respect in the company.

There should be criteria on how collaborative an employee is and 360° feedback from all peers they worked with in the org. Employees should not be able to select who they want to send feedback requests to, as this always generates a one-sided picture. This will generate incentive for employees to be empathetic and collaborative with peers, which is one of the only ways to make your employees show any kind of warmth in interactions.