I've worked at Amazon, I won't work there again, but I have (and likely will again) recommend it on occasion for other people as a hugely valuable learning experience. The reason is that Amazon has a strong bias towards getting stuff done, and because it's Amazon that means getting stuff done at scale. You are extremely unlikely to spend much time there without participating in shipping something that gets used by (or at least affects) millions of people, and you will have to struggle against the tooling and culture and even your coworkers to make it happen. I contrast that with say Microsoft or Google where devs may commonly spend years on stuff that never gets past a research project, all while enjoying the support of excellent tools and a collegial atmosphere.

Makes it sound like working in Amazon builds character, so you can know how good you have it elsewhere.

Which is a good idea in itself, but seems like it's best to just skip on that experience. Kind of like a type 2 kind of fun.

I've also heard of good experiences at Amazon, so maybe it's just particular organizations inside it that suffer a lot from this problem?

I work at Amazon and love it and don't want to work at Google because I want to work on meaningful big projects that deliver real value to customers rather than re-writing a Chat app for the 6th time, or spending time on mandatory-top-down monorepo merges.

I think I would be deathly bored at Google from everything I hear.

I work at Google and my team is working very hard on some greenfield stuff, although there's good work-life balance as well.

Don't believe everything you hear (although I suppose that works both directions).

Amazon is the "foot in the door" for many junior engineers. They start there, and they leave for greener pastures at some point (probably before two years). The sheer number of engineers that they hire (due to sheer turnover from people leaving) means you have a better chance of getting hired there than any other MANGA.

you are forgetting Facebook. it is Amazon culture on steroids

Right, I could work at Facebook, where they seem to be betting the company on an idea that Mark Zuckerberg got after watching a sci-fi movie -- that I'm not sure anyone is remotely excited about.

That can’t possibly be true. Facebook can’t be customer-obsessed in the same way Amazon is, because Facebook’s customers are advertisers. This puts Facebook’s product teams and engineers in a position where they often have to avoid doing what would be best for their users in order to satisfy the needs of advertisers.

Amazon is largely free of this kind of conflict: Customers and users are the same group of people.

I'm suprised to hear Facebook is this way. Almost everyone in Facebook that I know is chilling 50% of the time :)

I'm at FB currently, maybe it's a problem on other orgs but my experience has been very good (2 years). It's not perfect but I haven't heard horror stories like this, and my manager and pms are happy to let eng set project estimates.

Hey so I have to ask, do you actually like what you do? I don't mean that in a rude way or anything. I just honestly don't know what people do at FB anymore. Do you work on the core platform or are you working on Mark's new idea?

Yoooo, not offended at all. I work on the backend that powers navigation. I do like what I do. Of course it’s not as sexy as a 0-1 project at a startup but there are plenty of interesting problems and I really like the people. What makes me happy might not work for others of course. There are always trade offs

not really and happy to help to disprove your misconceptions

It's really not