Pros: Smart, passionate people and interesting projects.

Cons: Layoffs and tons of top-level politics make it hard to move up.

Pros: People are always very nice, friendly, and helpful. As an engineer, I have a great work-life balance. When it comes to delivering on new features, Square's tooling is a bit esoteric but usually gets the job done with minimal waiting. When it doesn't, the nice, friendly, and helpful people I just mentioned will unblock you really fast.

Cons: C-Suite leadership makes bizarre decisions (e.g., renaming to Block) that somehow promise to make *them* a lot of money, but don't contribute towards better products for users (e.g., Jack's obsession with crypto). There's a mixture of new and pleasant technology, and old legacy stuff that has to continue to be supported. This would not be so bad, except there is a surprising amount of resistance if you decide not to build *new* things with the old legacy technology. "Software architecture" isn't a priority for Block's microservices. So, while everything works and individual services have unit tests, creating usable APIs for cross-team boundaries is usually an afterthought that makes it a pain to ever make new connections.

Pros: Mission-driven company with passionate, skilled employees. Salary and equity are attractive, with flexible PTO. Remarkable transparency for a public company gives greater context, and regular all-hands meetings provide a forum for questions and feedback. Great corporate culture.

Cons: Fast growth could lead to problems later in terms of culture and focus shift. The DevOps model means engineers are stuck with pager duty; inconvenience varies by team. No support yet for 401k matching. Diversity could be better.