> Intel isn't a great place to work (despite their corporate value claiming it is), but by most accounts, Amazon is much worse unless you really like a place with cutthroat corporate politics.
I used to work at Intel. Some data points:
When the news about how bad Amazon's culture was (e.g. people crying at desk), my thoughts were "This sounds like Intel."
When you talk to Amazon employees, most say "Every team is different. We don't see such behavior in my team, and I don't work long hours (i.e. more than 40)." And the same can be said at Intel. If you're close to the fab, the behavior is crap. Software tends to be pretty chill. And you'll see everything in between. I recall once going in on Saturday and talking to a guy - he said he'd worked every weekend for the last 6 weeks and expects to continue doing so for a month or two more.
Everyone I know who has left Intel to join Amazon is happier at Amazon. Everyone. The most common refrains:
1. Good work/life balance at Amazon (although some had it good at Intel too).
2. Far fewer morons at Amazon. When you're in the non-core parts of Intel (e.g. software), the people around you are fairly poor in terms of talent (e.g. complaining about having to use Git, saying we're using it only because Microsoft owns Git (!), refusing to use branches in Git and insisting on just creating command line arguments for every experiment you want to try).
I feel like 90% of Intel's problem this last decade is not really understandding SW/tooling. It's what fated Itanium/Larrabee not to mention their whole SSD effort.
I used to work at Intel. Some data points:
When the news about how bad Amazon's culture was (e.g. people crying at desk), my thoughts were "This sounds like Intel."
When you talk to Amazon employees, most say "Every team is different. We don't see such behavior in my team, and I don't work long hours (i.e. more than 40)." And the same can be said at Intel. If you're close to the fab, the behavior is crap. Software tends to be pretty chill. And you'll see everything in between. I recall once going in on Saturday and talking to a guy - he said he'd worked every weekend for the last 6 weeks and expects to continue doing so for a month or two more.
Everyone I know who has left Intel to join Amazon is happier at Amazon. Everyone. The most common refrains:
1. Good work/life balance at Amazon (although some had it good at Intel too).
2. Far fewer morons at Amazon. When you're in the non-core parts of Intel (e.g. software), the people around you are fairly poor in terms of talent (e.g. complaining about having to use Git, saying we're using it only because Microsoft owns Git (!), refusing to use branches in Git and insisting on just creating command line arguments for every experiment you want to try).
Intel, though, does have better PTO.