Pros: 1. A very diverse organization to work for, you will have tons of learnings and personal growth. 2. Good food. 3. Depending on the team and work, you can explore different projects and extend your work scope depending on your bandwidth. 4. Lots of good and interesting projects.

Cons: 1. Flat team structures provide fewer opportunities to learn, and you are mostly on your own. 2. Legacy codebase. 3. Career growth may be a little slow.

Pros: Amsterdam; it's really all about living here. Lunch. Work-life balance.

Cons: After the CTO (Bank) left, company culture has fallen hard. Incompetent people were promoted to Directors in management because smart people left the company and there was nobody senior enough to fill the void. Most of the Product Owners are incompetent with no real-world experience. Management subtly forces people without a future to become TLs, to do their dirty work. Most of the engineering teams are led by designers who haven't written any code in their life. Nowadays, even copywriters are leading engineering teams :) Flexible hours is a lie, as they will literally put your ratings to 4 (Partially Meets Expectations) or 5 (Needs Immediate Improvement) if you're late in just a few standups. Your technical expertise holds no value here. They don't need it, and they're very open about it. HR is completely useless and will only support management decisions. Advice to people: Be very, very, very careful about selecting your Team Lead; it can make all the difference. Some guidelines I used to tackle that: * Shouldn't be a designer/user-researcher/copywriter; they won't ever be able to understand your tasks. * Should be actively involved in coding (ask his/her teammates about it, not him/her). Check git logs. * Should've more working experience than you (check LinkedIn; if no good companies are there, it could be a bad sign). * Should've at least 5 years of corporate experience (don't count freelancing & self-entrepreneurship ventures). * If they talk too much random without getting to the point, it's a bad sign! * If they put too much stress on communication then engineering, it's a bad sign. * Should've empathy; find out how to judge that. This one's most important.

Pros: Nice benefits, especially if you like to travel. Chill office culture; there's very rarely a feeling that you're under pressure to complete something. Developers are professional and good to work with. Completely flat structure of the IT department, meaning every developer is pretty much equal and allowed to design features and make technical decisions. The success of a feature is determined by the results of A/B testing. So you can pretty much work on anything, and no one will tell you that your idea is wrong, especially if it's successful on metrics. This is great if you are full of ideas and feel that management won't let you run with them.

Cons: Other side of the same things. A flat department structure means there's absolutely no plan and no control. Everyone can quietly implement a feature that doesn't fit with the rest of the code. On the other hand, if they get noticed, they are immediately harassed by every other peer developer who has something to say. Getting people to agree on anything is practically impossible, because there's no authority and someone always has an opinion against it. Every code change has to run through time-consuming A/B testing, which creates huge technical debt and makes it really difficult to deal with. All of this is viewed as a feature, not a bug; the company actually hires even more developers to run as many features as possible.