I suggest, in this discussion, to not consider a single company a real, monolithic entity, where everything works the same way everywhere on the planet.
I was at AWS 2008-2014, two years each in EMEA, APAC, Americas. I didn't contribute to code directly, but I built my own software demos (I was the tech evangelist for these regions).
My experience has been vastly different between these 3 "regions", and also when interacting with HQ in Seattle (which I visited very frequently).
There are certain things that unfortunately heavily affect the company - the internal tools were already considered quite bad back then, and I'm not surprised it hasn't changed much.
There are others, though, that in my view are even more important. I had a total of 4 managers, and three of them were amazing, average, and quite bad.
But in all honesty, I was probably not perfect all the time (real modesty, uh? :D), and it might be that the "bad" manager and me were just a poor match, or that I failed to understand things that made me perceive him as bad.
I will never work for someone else ever again in my life (I can afford to, both economically and career-wise; in fact, I just launched a VC fund in Europe), and I love that. But if I had to go back to a corporate job, my single best piece of advice would be: pick your manager wisely, especially if you're early in your career. Everything else is important, yes, but your manager is going to have a huge influence on how you develop, how happy you are, etc.
If you're curious, this is how I got hired by Amazon back in 2008 [0]. I find that post a bit naive in retrospect, but I also wrote it ~15 years ago.
I was at AWS 2008-2014, two years each in EMEA, APAC, Americas. I didn't contribute to code directly, but I built my own software demos (I was the tech evangelist for these regions).
My experience has been vastly different between these 3 "regions", and also when interacting with HQ in Seattle (which I visited very frequently).
There are certain things that unfortunately heavily affect the company - the internal tools were already considered quite bad back then, and I'm not surprised it hasn't changed much.
There are others, though, that in my view are even more important. I had a total of 4 managers, and three of them were amazing, average, and quite bad.
But in all honesty, I was probably not perfect all the time (real modesty, uh? :D), and it might be that the "bad" manager and me were just a poor match, or that I failed to understand things that made me perceive him as bad.
I will never work for someone else ever again in my life (I can afford to, both economically and career-wise; in fact, I just launched a VC fund in Europe), and I love that. But if I had to go back to a corporate job, my single best piece of advice would be: pick your manager wisely, especially if you're early in your career. Everything else is important, yes, but your manager is going to have a huge influence on how you develop, how happy you are, etc.
If you're curious, this is how I got hired by Amazon back in 2008 [0]. I find that post a bit naive in retrospect, but I also wrote it ~15 years ago.
[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...