[ctvo]

I also used to worked at Amazon.

There are elements of the culture I miss. The focus on writing was great. Shipping things quickly that impact a lot of people is nice. It made up for a lot of the deficiencies, and it isn't universal (cough Google). Amazon tends to make the right tradeoffs with tech choices to enable this, not always, but most of the time.

I enjoyed working with principal and senior engineers at Amazon. I didn't meet a single PE that I didn't thoroughly respect and enjoy talking with. I miss the internal PE talks, and I wish they'd make them public.

Compensation is deeply personal, but once I broke 400k, I really didn't care too much one way or another, and Amazon's total compensation was never significantly less than competitors. It was about the work, impact, and people.