Amazon has a certain body of engineers that get into the official culture, get involved in broomball and wing-eating competitions and the like, but there are fa

Amazon has a certain body of engineers that get into the official culture, get involved in broomball and wing-eating competitions and the like, but there are far more engineers who pretty much ignore the whole thing. As far as I could tell, the biggest piece of their culture is now a bunch of bitter engineers on internal mailing lists slowly working up the courage to leave for more enjoyable companies. That said, different teams at Amazon were SUPER different. Some teams went out drinking together twice a week, some teams were super extraverted and into video games, but many other teams were a bunch of quiet, serious introverts. TEAM fit was super important. This of course absolutely sucks for you if you get roped into interviewing for one team and you're a much better culture fit for a different team. Too bad. Rejected. IBM has a culture, it's just a boring culture. Pretty much a bad IBM culture fit is a person who's passionate about something in life. I'm sure there are parts of IBM that are different (it's huge), but I was just glad that I didn't have to wear a suit. Google-like companies are pretty much the opposite of IBM. If you don't have some weird interest you're passionate about, you kind of stick out.