Etsy

The mission of the company/product is great, and it's delightful to see how being a values-driven business permeates all levels of Etsy culture.

From the local snacks in the kitchenettes to the way meetings are carried, Etsy is a company that walks the walk when they talk about being driven by a mission of empowering small local creators.

Related to this is a great work/life balance. Etsy's a pretty cushy job.

On the engineering/product side of things, there's a pervasive fear of change at an institutional level. This means that anything that would improve the codebase or engineering process is a hard to impossible sell. Major "not invented here" syndrome means that engineers spend a lot of their time dealing with problems that are completely abstracted away in other similar engineering organizations because everyone's building on top of overengineered in-house tooling.

In a company-wide all-hands meeting, CTO John Allspaw recently referred to the engineering organization as "complacent." I agree with that assessment, but simply telling people to their face that they need to do a better job isn't how you actually enact change.

If you think your engineering organization needs transformation (and I personally agree), figure out how management can actually support and enable that.