Chegg

Great benefits, above-average salary, unlimited vacation policy, free lunch every day, awesome gym, very flexible work/life balance, challenging (but manageable) problems to work on, great opportunity for career development...

I could keep going on for quite a while. Chegg has exceeded every expectation I had and continues to do so.

I think that the greatest underlying success about Chegg is management's transparency. The leaders don't put up with hidden agendas, middle-management bureaucrats, or political power struggles--they keep communication clear and simple, focus on goals, and care about the customers as much as the future of the company.

The old HQ was getting pretty crowded, despite its nice 360 view of the entire South Bay. The new HQ office (as of Oct 2012) doesn't have the view, but makes up for it with much more space to grow.

Although I don't see it as a "con," I would suggest that it takes the right kind of person to excel here. If you're just looking for a job that you can go to for 8 hours and return home thinking that you were fishing the whole time, please don't bother applying.

We have some of the brightest minds working on monumental problems with a mission to make a better world by improving education. There are days that I'll keep working on a problem past 5 p.m., not because I need to, but because I want to. In fact, even if I were to leave the company, I would still try to find the solution to that problem because I love what I do. If you don't enjoy the work you do, you probably won't see Chegg the same way that I do. Of course, if you don't enjoy the work you do, you're unlikely to enjoy any job at any employer.

Keep the course! The company is clearly moving in the right direction.

Be very selective when hiring managers as we continue to grow. The managers we currently have are all great, but it's obvious that we'll need more as we continue adding more engineers to our workforce. I've seen (and worked at) too many places ruined by managers that can drive the talent out of a company in a matter of months.

In fact, as unconventional and extreme as it sounds, an idea might be to try hiring managers on a contract-to-hire basis just to ensure that something like that doesn't happen.