Pros: Arista has a good work-life balance with flexible hours, and they just started matching 401k contributions. The products are more reliable than their competitors', and Arista employs a comprehensive automatic unit-testing system that is unlike anything the competition has.

Cons: During interviews, Arista proudly touts that every employee is afforded time to do interesting work, with teams employing rotating job schedules in which every employee takes turns at the interesting aspects of software engineering and the not-so-interesting aspects of software engineering. What actually happens is that team managers come up with multiple ways to describe bug-fixing and rotate the same two to three employees through different "projects" that are all the same maintenance work. If you're not one of these two to three employees, you might enjoy working on interesting projects and learning new things. At Arista, bonuses and raises are determined by the "A-review/peer-bonus" system, in which every employee rates their colleagues based on their perceived contributions to the company. Naturally, this tends to favor the same employees who are getting the interesting projects, since nobody cares about fixing bugs. If you don't get a good A-review, then you aren't getting any bonuses or raises that year. So, you can waste your life away by working hard and cleaning up other people's bugs, and maybe after a couple of years, you might get slotted into a project visible enough that your coworkers might notice what you're doing and you might get a peer-bonus or something. Alternatively, you can fill out a job application at one of Arista's many competitors and get a much larger pay-hike now.

Pros: Engineering driven, less micromanagement.

Cons: Not a traditional review process.

Pros: Very talented software team. People are motivated by themselves and by the management as well to take the time to write tools and automate their tasks. Good tooling leads to more productivity and less mundane tasks. Great culture - "do the right thing" is the mantra. Rarely compromise quality over timelines. Very good culture of writing automated unit tests and end-to-end product tests. This is not new for web companies but is certainly rare in the networking industry. CTO is an inspiration. Inspires and cultivates the culture, for example by staying all night for the hackathon and coding up a great project. Peer review system provides a fair way to rank peers and provide feedback. It also removes the need to please your managers. Managers are mostly required to do software project management and rarely need to do the task of people management.

Cons: Some growing pains, slight decline in hiring standards as compared to a few years ago. Also, some bad apples have stuck around forever. Not sure how. No free lunches, massages, etc. Very average benefits. Does not have a "cool" tag attached to it. Peer review system's lack of transparency may upset people, especially those not benefiting from it. Not many people are happy with their compensation (excluding pre-IPO stock options).