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Having had an Amazon offer and being able to compare it to others, NO! * Amazon's health insurance offering is vastly inferior to that of, say, Microsoft or Google. I don't know what Google's health plan looks like, but I know that Microsoft's was "pretend your Canadian". Everything sensible and necessary is fully covered, with copays never being anything more than nominal. Everything: medical, dental, optical, disability, family, all of it. * Amazon requires longer hours and offers less vacation and holiday time than both Microsoft and Google. As a nice touch from my MS offer at the time, they offer 3 "floating holidays". These expire every year instead of accruing like vacation days, but they are usable more-or-less whenever for the purpose of accounting for cultural/religious occasions (Eid, Rosh ha'Shanah, Tanabata, Easter, Denali, whatever). * Amazon and MS both have cafeterias, but make you pay. MS has free drinks, though, and Google has free... everything. * Amazon offers higher salaries and attracts money-grubbers. MS offers lower salaries but better benefits. Google is more selective about hiring but offers higher salaries and better benefits. * Amazon requires almost every engineer to spend at least a month per year doing 24/7 on-call support. No other company I've ever seen practices this. Overall, Amazon appears to have caught itself in fantasies of being Galt's Gulch, while Google and even MS (not to even talk about Valve!) offer a lot more stability and benefits. It gives the impression that Amazon is perfectly happy with its high worker turnover, whereas the other two intend to hire for the long term. |