Pros: Great work-life balance, minimal amount of office politicking.

Cons: Lower pay and relocation will make the commute horrible.

Pros: Great balance of start-up culture with enterprise technology and support! You never see anyone in a suit, there are free snacks and refreshments, great work-life balance, and awesome after-hours events. Specifically for Engineers: Rather than mandating the use of existing technology and processes, teams are instead encouraged to experiment with the new, assimilate what is found to work well, and share their newfound knowledge with others. Also, I've been glad to find more gender-diverse engineering teams than I've seen at other companies.

Cons: If you're looking for your manager to tell you what to do every day and give you a big raise for doing only that, then this probably isn't the place for you. As with any office, there are examples of political decision-making, etc., but I've found these to be the exception rather than the norm.

Pros: Relatively up-to-date technologies used. Free sodas. Bellevue office has a nice view. Comfortable chairs. Microwaves in the break room.

Cons: Tribal atmosphere. No training on the system. No documentation on the system. Must work with no requirements at all. You will feel like an outsider and won't feel super welcome, especially if you are a contractor. The tribal atmosphere will treat you like some sort of interloper or invader. People aren't mean or anything, just not welcoming. Meanwhile, you are supposed to know which tribe to battle with to get stuff done. Knowing that before your start date is a must (good luck with that!). I was given no training at all, and the person that I was supposed to shadow was out of the country for a month. Other "team mates" were also gone for weeks at a time. There were a number of days where I was the only one of my team actually in the office, not very good for getting trained. So, I tried looking at documentation, only to find, well, nothing. There were a few things here and there, but nothing very useful and mostly out of date. But of course, it was my fault that I didn't have a complete understanding of the system after the first month. Well, duh, the guy supposed to be "training" me left the country for a month three days after I started. Also, there are some serious SDLC issues. This is a shop that believes agile means having absolutely no requirements or documentation. Any documentation done is a total afterthought. There are no comments in code, and code is totally not self-documenting. In my codebase, often classes have the same name, only differing in case. Requirements are in the form of an incomplete sentence, literally of the form "Make X do Y." That's it. You talk to three different team members and get three different interpretations. Refactoring multiple times until everyone on the team is happy, only to get smacked down from a different tribe. Refactoring again... It would've been nice if someone told me about the other tribe so I could talk to them directly, but that's not the way it's done here. The work itself isn't difficult; there's just too much dysfunction for me to have any desire to stay. *Update*: Yesterday, there was a yelling match between one group and another...so, yeah.