Pros: Twitch is an awesome product. The company is working on cool projects and employs pretty strong engineers. It is a great place to learn engineering best practices and do something impactful. You will shortly become an expert in AWS, too. Work and fun often go hand in hand: say, watching Twitch during business hours and playing video games after hours is quite common. The corporate culture is centered around ownership and KPIs, which is both good and bad. If you develop a service that does not correlate directly with the KPIs, your next manager may tell you to find a new owner or decommission it.

Cons: My biggest complaint is about compensation policy, which Twitch inherits from Amazon. During the last two years of the four-year contract, the annual compensation consists of the base salary (which is rumored to have a cap at $185K) and 40% of the RSU grant. Given the impressive performance of AMZN stock, this sounds lucrative. In reality, once compensation moves into the bracket for the next level, management is not happy about it. Those who get promoted see only little changes in their compensation, and new hires at the same level get much better pay. On the other hand, if you are not promoted, chances are that a cheaper new hire will replace you right before your next RSU vesting. So, in my opinion, it does not really make sense to stay beyond the two-year anniversary.

Pros: Smart and friendly coworkers. Fun gaming culture. Solid WLB and PTO. Modern tech stack that is usually improving.

Cons: Business is turbulent, and it always feels like we're gonna get laid off. Work-life balance takes a hit when we're approaching product launch. If you're on a bad team, it can be miserable, as I've heard.

Pros: Great work-life balance. Decent pay. Great tech stack.

Cons: Incompetent leadership. Layoffs are a sign of the start of the fall. They laid off many top talent, or overpaid talent, as a cost-cutting strategy which doesn't work in the long term. It's very much an Amazon-workplace culture now.