I had an offer from Amazon after grad school. There was only one reason I did not accept it: I had heard first person stories from a couple of my friends who were working at Amazon. And it did not make any sense to me to join such a work environment. One of them left Amazon to join Google, and is thriving at Google, which works well for him and his company. While at Amazon, he was constantly cynical, negative and it felt that the work environment was affecting him personally. As a developer, I need to be happy and stress free to provide good quality, thoughtful solutions (I'm sure not everyone is like me, and many would certainly thrive at Amazon). I couldn't see myself doing that at Amazon.