Pros: Great culture, a lot of smart people, and good work-life balance.

Cons: No stock, no clear technical career path for engineers who don't become managers, and a lack of new strategic initiatives, thus no huge growth potential in the near future.

Pros: I was lucky to hold an SDE position in the Infrastructure department of Blumberg R&D in the NY office. Not much to complain about: a lot of smart, experienced people, interesting technologies, and challenging tasks. My management was OK with flexible work hours and working from home once in a while. Compensation is relatively generous, and the performance review is not very formalized: if your management feels like giving you a raise, they don't have to jump through a lot of hoops to justify it to their management.

Cons: Pace is crazy, release schedules are tough. Long hours are normal and expected; everyone in the company works like this. Software development processes are not aligned across different teams, so you can get into a situation where you're assigned to a project grown up from a prototype with no infrastructure around it. One thing you'll run into immediately: a lot of legacy code, sometimes pretty old. A bunch of old proprietary technologies are still in use, and you'll have to deal with it. Though the process of migration to newer technologies is slow but steady. Compensation is lower than in banks on Manhattan. If you quit your job not because of family reasons, you'll not be hired back ever. Keep that in mind.

Pros: You will get technical work to do here. The workload is a bit much, but it's fine as long as you have challenging jobs to do. Some work pressure is there.

Cons: Work-life balance is somewhat not easy, as I've seen in my previous companies. Managers always keep the pressure on for the job. But all are hardworking people, and it inspires me as well to excel.