Pros: Those of you who worked at traditional networking companies will be amazed at the tools, technologies, and development environment that we have. We don't connect two switches the traditional way; we have Python and our test infrastructure to do that. Testing your new feature the traditional way is much harder than testing it via the infra we have. Moreover, you would spend most of the time designing the feature. The donkey work you did for robust unit testing is no longer needed. It has been streamlined, and the testing efforts you put in will be leveraged whenever someone changes the relevant code. There are hardly any bugs, bugs of the kind you would have seen in your previous N jobs at networking companies. Coming to people: this is the highest concentration of smartest people I have ever seen. You don't need to stretch yourself to explain a complicated item in the code that you are looking at very closely; people just get it. One mail, one diagram on board, and you are there. Stocks have great potential. Yes, even if you are joining today, and with average valuation for the company, you will make a reasonable amount.

Cons: Compensation. See the advice to management section.

Pros: The projects are interesting, the pay is competitive depending on your stock entrance price, coworkers are great, and work/life balance is fantastic.

Cons: It can be very easy to slip into the same position or role for years, and management doesn't seem to care about that. Internal promotion possibilities (in title) are near impossible. Pay bands, aka engineering levels, are hidden from employees, which makes it harder to know the going rate.

Pros: Nice projects. Get to work on new features.

Cons: Frugal company. Review system is flawed. No hikes.