Pros: - A solid company that is pushing the frontier on observability and AI - Well-scoped work, focusing on well-being and avoiding burnout - Plenty of room for learning, growing, and experimenting

Cons: - Priorities might shift suddenly or at the last minute at the beginning of the quarter - Internal reorgs happen from time to time, but there are no layoffs

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: 1. Quickly growing company with a great product. 2. Fair compensation and benefits.

Cons: 1. Lack of a proper engineering career path - There are not many engineering levels, which means that there are Senior Software Engineers with a difference of 10+ years of experience, all with the same title. Getting promoted to a Staff Engineering level can be extremely difficult compared to other companies. 2. Not remote-friendly - While they do hire for remote roles, much of the engineering teams are office-based, and it can be difficult to integrate as a remote engineer. 3. Lots of junior engineers - The ratio of junior to more senior engineers is far greater than in many other places where I have worked. I have to do a bit more hand-holding at Datadog.