One free coffee a day is asinine. MS gives you all the free soda and coffee you could want, and their food courts are great. I assume this is true of Google as well. How the hell does Amazon keep finding employees?
It already has been biting them. There was a leaked memo last year about how they're exhausting the labour supply in many of their warehouse markets. And while there hasn't been a memo as such, people I know who are still there say it's been borderline impossible to hire good engineering candidates for the past few years. A former teammate said he was being pulled into interview blitzes where they'd interview six candidates in a day, then the recruiter would apply as much pressure as humanly possible to "just pick one and say yes."
This has always been true of Amazon. It was true when I joined ten years ago, and it was true ten years before that.
Okay, sure, there have been small carrots at various points. The company Christmas party used to be pretty wild. But even those small carrots have been getting stripped over time.
When I see young engineers considering a job at Amazon, I tell them to only take it if they have no other options. Amazon will find a way to traumatise you, and you might not even realise it for years. I've been gone for four years now, and I've suddenly found myself constantly worried about being fired, even following good performance reviews. It's a story every ex-Amazonian I know has lived out in some way.
tl;dr, fuck Amazon.
The phone rooms are always taken, usually have broken lights or trash on the floor/desk.
There’s absolutely no perks. The office cafe is expensive and awful food quality. My team wanted to have a holiday dinner and was told the company won’t pay for it, we have to pay out of pocket. There’s no budget for things like after-work events. Want to get drinks after work with your team? No budget for it.
We’re forced to sit in agile desks that nobody likes. You aren’t allowed to customize your desk is any way. You aren’t allowed to leave anything overnight on your desk, even if you’re going to use the same desk the next day.
The _only_ perk we have is that you are allowed to get one free coffee per day from the onsite barista, and even that they have tried to get rid of multiple times.
I used to work at a company that had a hybrid workforce and it had no issue getting people to come into the office by incentivizing people with basic stuff like a nice office or company-sponsored events.
Amazon is all stick, no carrot and it’s honestly embarrassing that a company this big could be so inept at something other companies figured out decades ago. Either that, or they aren’t even trying. I don’t know which is worse.