Pros: Amazing benefits and compensation. Work from home. Awesome spending wallet on food, tech, lifestyle, and health that refreshes monthly. Team culture: everyone is willing to help out, and senior leadership is always open to feedback. Great place to gain experience and grow under awesome engineers.

Cons: Smaller company, so workload can get kind of heavy at times. A lot of learning by yourself when you first join. Documentation heavy on projects. Sometimes I feel like multiple project specs (project spec, product spec, tech spec) are unnecessary; having one technical document is enough. No 401k matching, but the other benefits are pretty good, so I don't really mind.

Pros: Generally, people really do care about the mission and use it to guide difficult decisions. There's of course a spectrum, as with the employees of any company, but I found that it's less of a talking point and more of a priority at Affirm. Affirm was the best learning experience I've had by far. The people at Affirm are smart and motivated, and being surrounded by people like this forces you to become a better version of yourself. There are good opportunities within Engineering to expand and try new things. There's an emphasis on personal development as long as you can align that with company goals. I'm generally quite bullish on Affirm and its success moving forward. There are definitely risks, but it's positioned itself well to succeed.

Cons: Sometimes aggressive business/product goals can be unrealistic, which means that engineers end up working extra hard to get things done. Decisions and scoping are always done jointly between product and eng, but people generally expect that you'll stick to loose deadlines you've set for yourself, so it's important to scope appropriately. As with most tech companies, people sometimes get recognized for high-visibility projects more than projects that are equally important but less well-known. These are the main things that I can think of. Overall, my time at Affirm was quite good; I ended up leaving because of personal reasons and not because of any issues with Affirm.

Pros: Affirm tackles some interesting problems. Performance management standards have historically been lax (although this could be a con for higher achievers).

Cons: During the IPO, Affirm's equity administrator experienced a system malfunction, causing many employees to lose a good chunk of their pre-IPO proceeds. Affirm decided it was not their problem and left employees on their own. Overall, a good company to work for, but I would be skeptical of the true value of any stock-based compensation you're offered.