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: Big, successful tech company that makes money by selling a product rather than its users’ private data. * Product is beloved by many. * Practically limitless scope for career growth of individual contributors, without needing to transition to management. * Effective processes for high-level product and technical decision-making. * Great work/life balance. * Top-tier office and job perks.

Cons: Reorgs are common, and engineers tend to move teams a lot, reducing incentives to write maintainable code. Aggressive internal deadlines add incentives to write unmaintainable code in order to ship quickly. Issues are bounced around as teams refute “ownership” of the code in question. No strong company-wide standard of people management is in evidence, and managers’ aptitude for the job varies. Career advancement seems to hinge more on following the letter of the leveling guidelines than actual job performance. The NYC office gets next to no natural light.

Pros: The engineering team is some of the best people to work with that I've ever met. The team isn't just smart people; the company does a great job of selecting people who will be able to work well with others. For an engineer, it's a fun place. They've got a range of really exciting technical problems to solve. And when you solve them, you get to see people actually use what you built. The company is built as an actual business. The management has been carefully building a sustainable, long-term business. They provide a valuable service, which people are happy to pay for. They've got a good plan for how to continue and grow the business.

Cons: A shocking amount of abandonware exists in the technical stack. Senior people are strongly encouraged to have side-projects in addition to their primary work, but they aren't given time to support them. Therefore, there's a lot of widely used code implemented by trusted people, which is completely unsupported.