Question

In the competition between Google and Amazon, in what areas is Google more likely to win and in what areas is Amazon more likely to win?

Answer 1

when you see these companies as an employee,

Work environment - Google wins
Better equipment, better office space, an incredible number of perks and benefits. Free food, free drinks (pop, strange waters, etc.). Amazon has none of this.

Work-life balance- Google
Google offers more vacation, more standard holidays, more leave for personal events, better sick leave, better support for a family. In general software engineering at Amazon involves much more on-call, higher stress, less flexibility in work hours, and more expected overtime.

Pay - It depends, but usually Google will pay substantially better.

Impact and work - Amazon
At Amazon the average software engineer gets to do more interesting, more impactful work sooner than software engineers at Google.

Opportunity - Amazon
Amazon has a sort of revolving door for software engineers. In other words, people don’t stay nearly as long as they do elsewhere. Amazon is growing. There is a huge amount of opportunity there. At Google, on the other hand, attrition is much lower, and general growth - at least in the areas I worked - is lower. Not nearly as much opportunity for growth at Google.

if we talk about culture then,
Amazon is like a rainforest having multiple ecosystems. The company focuses on business mode and products, meanwhile it boasts itself as a “tech” company. Amazon has both hardware and software products, facing to individual customers and business enterprises as well.

. It is the cradle of engineering culture, it has most talented geeks over the world, it pursues the most cutting-edge and coolest technology forever, and it leads and builds the highest engineering bar in the tech world. To some extent, it is heaven for software engineers.

However, many people left Google just because it has too many genius. Those guys work on the best products and leave no chance for ordinary Google engineers, although they are much more talented compared to nobody. Most guys leave the company just because they could fulfill their ability and success easier without such fierce competition at Google.