Amazon reviews

You'll learn a lot and its a growing environment. I used to get really frustrated about the focus on frugality and the not-invented-here and build-it-over-buy-it mentality there. However, seeing how the rest of the work does IT, I'm good with the frugal approach and building it and doing work. Most people out there do IT via spending money on products to expand the domain of the IT manager, without any focus on the business, and without any metrics for success -- Amazon is the opposite fo that. Everything needs a cost justification and its difficult to build empires without any competency. The topgrading environment is actually good in some ways because it does eliminate a lot of the people that you have to put up with at other jobs who are totally useless. The bar raising interviews and stack ranking does actually mean that you might be working with a bunch of other decently talented people rather than trying to drag a department along single handed. I usually get bored at a company after 2-3 years, but I stuck with Amazon for nearly 5 years before getting bored with it because it was growing so fast (grew from managing 400 servers to 30,000 servers in 5 years). At some point, though, I'd learned most of the lessons dealing with scale, and that exposed the fact that I simply didn't like working for the company or the upper management (Bezos in particular).

The company hires really smart people and create a great product that really focuses on the end user.