Pros: They take care of employees and are empathetic to needs.

Cons: A "hacker first" culture leads to a lot of bloat.

Pros: Aggressive pay rates that aimed to compete with top-talent companies (Google and Facebook were routinely called out). Stable company that appears to be able to weather turbulent market conditions without massive layoffs.

Cons: Leadership was very divorced from the day-to-day work of employees, which translated to a lot of needless frustration and crunch on behalf of bottom-level workers. Company culture around DEI was shockingly poor (especially with regard to women's issues), and top-level leadership was flippant at best about these problems. While they theoretically support remote work, in practice their benefits, IT, and HR teams are entirely focused on the main HQ locations, meaning remote employees are often left floundering on their own for even basic issues. Crunch time was a constant expectation, especially for those lower in the hierarchy: on-call shifts of 3 weeks out of 4 was the norm, and most engineers are expected to contribute extra hours towards interviews (often multiple per week).

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.