Pros: Dropbox is a company that's growing like wildfire, and with that comes opportunities to grow your career. We're laying the foundation, both technically and culturally, for years to come, and we all have an opportunity to make an impact. This is especially true in New York, where we're building the company's first remote engineering office. I feel that the company headquarters in San Francisco supports us and is empowering us to succeed. Across the company, I've worked on meaningful projects with incredibly-smart people.

Cons: Work-life balance is a tricky thing at a company that's doing so many different things and growing in so many different directions. Dropbox has (to great benefit) been stingy about hiring, but it means that there are fewer people to do more things. Work-life balance is certainly respected, but I find myself sometimes struggling to disconnect, though that may be me more than Dropbox.

Pros: We focus on making the user's life simpler, and we are trying to build a company that makes money because people pay us for what we offer, which is fairly unique in this day and age where most companies are focused on eyeballs to show ads. We also solve challenging technical problems at scale, both on the client (large amounts of personal data, in fast, low-resource clients, across a wide variety of platforms) and in our backend (large amounts of data, mostly unique per user). When we build things, we strive to build them correctly, both because we're protecting data that is precious to our users, but also because we believe in quality and things just working for our users. Benefits, time off, etc., are all world-class, but they're not the reason you should work here. The reason to work here is the focus on the user, the focus on quality, and solving hard engineering problems.

Cons: The company is growing fast, and growing causes pain. Medium-term goals change more often than at a big company or than they would if it was a less competitive space, since we're always trying to balance being nimble without getting distracted. It's part of the fun, but it can take a little to get used to.

Pros: High-impact projects affecting millions of users. The technical challenges are immense, and there are many interesting product problems to tackle as well.

Cons: Dropbox can be a chaotic place to work. You have to be able to work with others and manage your time well in order to get anything done.