Pros: Hiring process: The whole hiring process was great. The recruiters always told me about the next steps and what else was missing in the process. The process went quite quickly (in fact, I slowed it down a bit because I was doing another process). At the end, I had a team matching round where I was able to pick between 3 teams. I was also able to negotiate a pretty good compensation package. Onboarding: The onboarding was well organized. You have 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day "lookbacks" (reviews) to see if you're meeting expectations and what you should be focusing on. My manager is pretty hands-off and the team has been very welcoming, helping me with the ramp up and answering any questions for me. The office: I'm based in the Madrid office. You have to come 3 days per week. You have free lunches Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Most people either come Mon-Wed or Mon/Wed/Fri. The office usually organizes office-wide activities once a month. There is a mix of international and Spanish-speakers. The company/Exec: IMO Exec seems to have a clear direction for the company. Things get a bit more fuzzy at the team level, with Product and Engineering disagreeing on the specifics of certain OKRs/efforts (classic Tech). Depending on your Org/team, things can feel a bit more hierarchical, but overall I've had a very good feeling of the company.

Cons: I can't think of much. The 3-days per week office policy is okay, but I really hope they don't change it. Otherwise, I know a lot of people would be unhappy. It also depends a lot on your manager or organization. I know some people come once or twice a week, and their managers don't care. Others would get a comment in their 1-1s if they haven't come 60% of the days to the office in a given month.

Pros: Above market salaries. Interesting technology and roadmaps. Stocks. Languages used.

Cons: Your experience may vary A LOT depending on the team you land. Too much politics sometimes.

Pros: Good pay, nice benefits, a nice, beautiful office, interesting problems to work on, and a successful company. If you manage to keep your head down, you can probably coast pretty easily here.

Cons: Code quality is quite low. Many, if not most, systems at Datadog were built by one-man "teams" of engineers, often as hack-day side-projects, rapidly launched to production well before they were ready. Applications are almost never built in a "normal" way, and there are whole applications without a single test. As a consequence, systems break frequently, and no one even knows how they're supposed to work. As a competent developer, you'll probably notice this in your first two weeks, but you'll also soon discover that there are many sacred cows at Datadog. Despite their obvious deficiencies, the design of these systems is largely non-negotiable. Most of your work will consist of a constant barrage of surprisingly crude DevOps changes just to keep the thing running. For many teams, most work is unplanned and very stressful because it's done in response to outages (we have 3 or 4 outages every day, so half your day will be spent working on "urgent" problems). Backend engineers also participate in the on-call rotation, which ends up being once every 4-6 weeks and lasts for a week at a time. You will be responsible for 90% of the systems, even though you know nothing about them. Because everything is mostly broken, you will be paged every hour. Also, you will get to experience the joys of working with an international team, where because almost every change at Datadog results in an outage, the developers in France will consistently wake you up at 4 AM every morning. The company has grown rapidly, but management has not kept pace. Team leads have no experience in leadership, do no planning, and make irrational, heavy-handed decisions. Concerns are not taken seriously, and you'll be treated like a junior engineer regardless of your prior experience.