Arista Networks

Good pay: Regular compensation adjustments and bonuses, competitive for the area.

Work-life balance is great*: Most teams prefer weekly meetings instead of daily. Nobody pays attention to the hours you work as long as you are showing up to important meetings and getting work done. No micromanagement. Depends on your manager.

• Unless you need to work with someone in an inconvenient timezone.

Good time off: Easy to schedule paid time off. In the US, it's considered "unlimited," but the unspoken rule is that you shouldn't take more than 20 days a year. Depends on your manager. It's also easy to schedule unpaid time off if you need a longer vacation (3-6 months, etc.).

Lots of different types of work: Hardware engineering, super low-level platform stuff, high-level platform-agnostic stuff, web stuff, DevOps stuff, etc.

Flexibility: Given approximately 2 years of experience and good standing with your manager, it's generally possible to pick up work in a different team if you'd like to work in a different area. However, this depends on your manager and availability within other teams.

Security: I've never seen someone get laid off. If you're consistently productive to the standards of your manager, there is basically no risk of layoff.

Remote: Offers 100% virtual employment, but upper management has been trying for over a year to push people to come back to the office some of the days of each week.

Code quality: Lots of technical debt everywhere and sparse, often useless, documentation. Expect to spend a lot of time on maintenance and debugging things.

Documentation quality: Really bad. Arista encourages an open environment where engineers should ping each other directly if they need help with something. This has its upsides; it's nice to be able to talk to someone when you need help, but clear and up-to-date documentation is neglected because everyone tends to just ping each other. If you maintain an important piece of code, expect to be answering questions about it whenever someone new is working on it. This can also lead to single points of failure when the one engineer that knows how some undocumented thing works is on vacation or has left the company.

Career outline: Arista probably doesn't have a roadmap in mind for your career. Expect to have to drive that yourself. If you want growth, you'll need to actively pursue it. This may mean picking up tasks that haven't been assigned to you explicitly, or consistently asking your manager for more code ownership or responsibility. If you aren't proactive, it's easy to end up working on small or menial tasks. If you are proactive, you'll likely be fine.

Undefined roles: There's a culture of "everyone is an engineer" and "everyone does everything," which in practice means that you'll be expected to learn or do whatever needs doing, regardless if you're interested or not. This can be a pro or a con, depending on how you feel about it.

Undefined tasks: Things are highly manager-dependent, and there's no unified method of documenting features and tasks. I've heard of people working on things for months and then throwing all the work away because of miscommunication or a change of direction. This is likely manager-dependent.

Working across timezones: There is basically no effort made to minimize the interactions across timezones. If you need to collaborate with someone on the other side of the world, expect that you may have to attend regular meetings at 6 am or 11 pm, or some other ridiculous hour. A lot of this could be alleviated with async text communication, but Arista doesn't prioritize that. You will be expected to be flexible. This probably depends on managers.

Implicit seniority: Arista claims to have no hierarchy or a flat structure where seniority doesn't matter, but this is absolutely not true. Levels and ranks are hidden from you (you may be able to deduce your level based on your compensation, but it will never be confirmed explicitly). At the end of the day, managers and directors call the shots, and during peer review, seniority is often the metric that you will use to rank your coworkers. I knew someone whose manager explicitly asked them to change their peer review rankings to better reflect years of experience at the company.

Diversity: Arista tends to tokenize and pay lip service to diversity and inclusion. Rather than hiring outside help and giving proper funding to diversity and inclusion initiatives, they tend to dump the responsibility on busy women or POC engineers without proper resources, then pat themselves on the back. This is clearly seen in the demographic of the employees. It's also a common occurrence to hear your coworkers discussing politics openly. In such a polarized political climate, this can create an unfriendly work environment. HR will hear your complaints and address them case by case, but they are not proactive, so the responsibility lands on you to contact HR if you become uncomfortable.

It's all in the review.