Software Engineer • Former Employee
Pros: Business is doing well, seemingly in the right place at the right time.
High-growth company, expanding rapidly in all dimensions, with free food and a fun environment.
Charismatic CEO gets attention and buzz for the company.
A new VP of Engineering is bringing maturity and leadership to the engineering organization.
Cons: If you're industry experienced (not "senior," as that's 1-2 years out of college at Box), expect to be working almost entirely with inexperienced/young engineers.
Most are great to work with and want to learn; however, in general, the culture does not value experience. Be prepared to see lots of questionable judgment/competence demonstrated by the homegrown, tenured developers leading projects.
Engineering caliber and quality of people are below Google/Microsoft levels. A surprising number of "seniors" are lacking CS fundamentals (OO design, what's cohesion, using assertions?). Some B's are hiring C's going on (... will hopefully improve as Box adopts a more Google-like model in hiring, reviews, etc.).
Lots of untested legacy code, 10,000-line functions, tightly coupled, and fragile code are commonplace. Major efforts are underway to write tests and turn quality around, but it's very much a work in progress.