Pros: Discord is an excellent place to work. The team is full of talented, hardworking, ambitious, and humble people. If you use Discord, then you know the Discord application itself is superb. It takes a great team to make a great application. Since Discord is a younger company, there are plenty of opportunities for career growth as we expand. The management team focuses a lot on growing people. There are weekly or bi-weekly 1-on-1s with your manager that are solely focused on career growth. The benefits package is solid. You can check the website for the most up-to-date information. It is on par or better than other places I have worked. My personal favorite benefits are free lunch and gym membership. For engineering specifically, Discord has been an excellent place to work. Discord has a knack for embracing new technologies while still remaining stable in the face of growth. For example, we were early to embrace Rust, Scylla, and React. Also, Discord's engineering team (and entire company, really) is exceptionally small for the number of users it has. So far, we have been diligent about growing the team intelligently. Additionally, we follow many industry best practices around testing, deployment, and product development. We also spend a decent amount of time doing forward-thinking refactoring and development in order to stay out of tech debt. There are a lot of interesting technical challenges at Discord. If you like scaling a fast-growing product, then working at Discord will be a lot of fun.

Cons: Discord is a fast-growing unicorn startup. It's exciting, but chaotic at times. If you have a hard time with things changing, then Discord might not be a good fit. With that said, things have become much more stable over time, and I expect that to continue to be true.

Pros: Almost everyone I dealt with was super nice. I felt good about what we were working on. The company does a lot with a smaller eng team.

Cons: Hard to transfer internally due to size. Grew too fast during the pandemic, so some management and reorg has been hard. Just had layoffs to correct for that mistake.

Pros: Career growth: Managers actually care, encourage, assist, and find opportunities for employees to grow within their roles (or even change roles entirely). Fantastic leadership: They are competent, intelligent, humble, and kind. They're thoughtful about the impact of their actions, actually listen to and actively encourage employee feedback, own and correct any mistakes, and repeatedly demonstrate that they care about the well-being of each employee (this has become particularly apparent during the pandemic). They've also demonstrated a clear commitment to ensuring the product is not used to spread hatred of any kind, by building (and continuing to grow) a strong Trust and Safety team. Coworkers skilled in many disciplines: Discord has a high hiring bar, and you'll learn a ton from your talented team-members. In addition to screening for strong role-related skills, the interview process screens for strong "soft skills." There's a strong culture of collaboration, transparency, and asking questions. Culture of transparency: From the leadership to the employees, everyone is encouraged to speak up about anything at any time (with option for maintaining anonymity). Discord acknowledges that it's okay to make mistakes and to be "wrong" about something. Great benefits: Discord is very thoughtful in their benefits offering, currently including fully-covered vision/dental/health insurance, mental and physical health funds, transgender medical funds, remote-work funds, generous PTO and sick-leave policy, and others I am forgetting. Modern tech stack: A good chunk of the tech stack is beautiful and modern, and the parts that are less lovable are being overhauled one-by-one. Fun problems: The work we're doing is fun, challenging, and rewarding (for the most part).

Cons: Employee ambition: Some senior employees are ambitious and never stop working. Management has repeatedly encouraged us not to follow these examples, to take time off, and not overwork ourselves. However, some people enjoy it, and that can lead other employees to assume they need to do the same to succeed.