Amazon

"Very fast paced. Requires high sense of ownership. Benefits are standard, not many other perks."

"It really depends on your manager. The company as a whole does a terrible job promoting diversity etc. Compared to other prospective employers in the area, it has the worst maternity leave policy (and no paternity leave policy). The fact that there is 0 paid paternity leave is particularly unfair - how comfortable are you in taking maternity leave, if somene else who has kids get none? My direct manager was amazing, so I had a pretty good experience there, but my boss' boss was from Turkey, and had a very traditional eastern-european approach to childcare (stay at home mom, travel a lot father) and therefore wasn't very supportive to my career. Whenever he came to my area, he spent the entire time talking to another developer (also turkish) in turkish. Amazon is such a mixed bag. As a company, they don't focus at all on any of the things more enlightened companies at least try to focus on (parental leave, diversity and inclusion, work life balance), but depending on your direct manager or your peers, things can be really good there. Or really bad. Also worth noting, there is only 1 nursing room per building (although its pretty nice). During my year of nursing, I was able to get into the nursing room exactly 2 times. There were around 20 lactating mothers in the entire building, each taking 30 minutes or so to do their thing, it was pretty much impossible. All the meeting rooms/offices have transparent doors. I had to bring a sheet, kick my manager out of his office, and hang it up on his door, and pump in there. Terrible."

"Be prepared to bet treated as sub-par and to fight for every win. I worked there for just over 2 years and being run over by under experienced and dehumanizing males, it made it difficult to "do the right thing" on a daily basis. If you "disagree and commit" you are a stark raving bi_-_ and if you don't stand firm you don't have "backbone"."

"Spent 3 years at Amazon on AWS EC2. I left due to discrimination by my manager, which made my last 1.5 years pretty awful. Lots of being judged differently to others for the same work, got shouted at, told I was whining when I asked for more responsibility. I understand that there are bad managers everywhere, but my poor review comes from the way in which my complaints were handled by senior management. When I first spoke to my skip level manager about how I was being treated, he spoke a lot about how gender discrimination was still a big problem in the tech industry, but did nothing more with my complaint. When I took it to HR, we had a dispute resolution session. I waited more than 6 months for the results. When they came, it was that he had acted inappropriately. The repercussions? He was suggested to do a course about being a better manager if it became available in his location (in the intervening 6 months he'd changed teams and locations). No mention of bias. No mention of any larger problem. Since I left, 3/4 other women in the office of 250 (we were remote) have left citing similar issues. I'd put it down to culture in a remote office, but the senior members were from Seattle (and so was my awful manager). I learnt a lot of things while there, great operational experience, but man, I took a beating too."

"I worked at Amazon only as an intern. Interesting projects to work on, but not a very friendly culture for women."

"Amazon is largely male-dominated, and so at times, it can definitely feel isolating being one of the few women in the office (only 12% are women in my organization). Also, from my experience, team events can often gear towards male interests, and I feel that the upper management does not see supporting diversity in tech as a priority. There has been many times when a letter to the upper management regarding better environment for women employees goes unheard. As well, (unsurprisingly) it is not uncommon to see unconscious bias in the office and insensitive comments coming from male coworkers. The good thing is, there is a very large and supportive community for women in engineering, where such topics are discussed. Employees also have the chance to attend many events, like the Grace Hopper Conference. It is just that, oftentimes, it can feel like mostly everyone who cares are women. And so we don't see improvements to the workplace as quickly as other companies."