Is Amazon really such a bad employer? I've just started process with them now. I dont want to work for Facebook, there is no local Netflix and I'm probably not good enough for Google - Amazon is the only FANG company I'm realistically going to get.
This is an example of how this interferes with the career of a very senior executive: https://www.geekwire.com/2021/microsoft-standoff-amazon-big-... However, this problem also affects junior engineers, more junior than you may think.
Google of today isn't the same as that of a decade ago. It's just another megacorp.
They have some good cultural points (easy to change teams) but also bad ones (bad on-call). So depending on your tolerance of WLB vs salary, and how good you are at shipping, you could have a good experience.
I have been lucky, in that I had worked with my first team's director at a previous company and so I knew he was a good boss, and I had known the manager for my second team prior to joining. It's important as part of the interview process (at Amazon, or anywhere else) to treat the interview as a two-way process, as you're vetting the company, the team, and your boss as much as they're vetting you, and if you don't get all your questions answered as part of the interview (interviewers are supposed to save time for you to ask questions!), feel free to relay them to your recruiter.
I have friends that work at Amazon. It seems that work/life balance varies quite a bit among different parts of it.
A company sent me roles at $125k recently. I wrote them back with a polite variation of "heck no, my rate is $250k".
I'm currently quite broke-- $5k to my name (too many sabbaticals, plus only recently paid off student debt and pivoted into engineering). But I bluff every time and sometimes it works out. Nothing to lose: there seem to be infinite employers in need of software engineers.
They wrote back to schedule an interview.
Excluding finance, there's Spotify, Doordash, Salesforce, Square, Twitter (incl. remote), Coinbase (remote), Palantir, Roku, Affirm, Robinhood... and that's just the publicly-traded companies that explicitly have offices in New York. You have even more options looking at companies that are either remote-friendly, or are late-stage startups with competitive equity grants (i.e. Stripe, Instacart, etc), or both (there's a lot of overlap between those two categories).