Pros: - Bright and friendly teammates. It's a pleasure to work alongside my co-workers. - Flexible working hours. - Great for learning and progressing your career. Lots of support from within and outside the teams. Flexibility in choosing one's path. - Variety of interesting projects. Awesome challenges and meaningful problems to solve. - High standard of engineering and best practices applied. Using a modern tech stack and keeping projects neat, organised, and efficient. - Fair, transparent and excellent remuneration package. - Awesome equipment, sensible staff policies & meaningful benefits.

Cons: - Fast-paced, meaning it's sometimes a chaotic and unpredictable journey. However, that seems inevitable in a progressive and rapidly expanding scale-up. Also, it's worth noting that this has been improving steadily and going in the right direction.

Pros: If you want to pretend and do good to sell what you are doing, it's the right place. Or if you have a friend who's in the leadership team.

Cons: - Work hard to get close to the leadership team and get awarded. - If you want to work with people who don't have any empathy, it's the right place. - People are getting made redundant just before Christmas, and the leadership team is still pretending all is good. Seriously? - Are you a close friend with the CTO? Great, you will get new pillar leadership. - They are leaders who have changed teams and pillars a few times. They obviously failed, they had a lot of people made redundant, but they are still there and even getting rewarded for this. - Lower-level managers have zero power; they have to follow what they are told. - It depends on which team you work in. In some teams, it's three days mandatory; in some, it's not. They can't control this; it's so unfair.

Pros: The engineers are mostly good people. You might learn finance things, but you won't learn good technical practices. First, this might be a pro or con of Checkout, depending on you: be aware that Checkout is a pro-cryptocurrency company. Checkout doesn't hold or make cryptocurrency; they're not an FTX. But Checkout works with cryptocurrency companies and has a head of "Crypto Strategy". The company makes profit off real money flowing in and out of cryptocurrency vendors, so they encourage other people to waste money on cryptocurrency in general. At Checkout, you'll have to sit through all-hands meetings where senior staff talk glowingly about stablecoins, NFTs, or the like. It's better to choose an employer whose views align with yours on this.

Cons: The rest of my observations: YMMV as the team silos are deep. This is a Westrum category 1 organization. The engineers are mostly good people, although the ones with deep in-house technical knowledge are isolated from industry best practices, don't know what they are missing, and have no incentive to learn. But autonomy is very low. Information is hoarded. Technical practices are not uniform across the board; they are patchy, and there's no desire to level up. Checkout is not a company that encourages speaking openly or saying that things could be done better. Do not expect psychological safety. Do not expect change. The "DevOps team" has "no intent" to do continuous delivery practices. They are deeply invested in outdated tools, manual testing, and teams supposedly rolling their own automation, which of course, these teams never have the time and skills for. It's a step back in time. Management can be toxic. Some line managers are enlightened, but some just expect micromanagement and Jira-closing feature factory behavior, i.e., work the machine harder, not smarter. It's not supportive. Some managers play politics or bully with false stories and trivial stuff, like it's middle school. This is left unaddressed, i.e., quietly condoned.