LinkedIn

Unlike a lot of places you could work, LinkedIn has a good product that you might actually use. :)

The company culture is excellent.

Work/life balance is great.

It's a safe place to learn new things, try new roles, etc. without fearing for your job.

The cafeteria and coffee bars are great (pre-COVID).

Compensation is good – not the best but definitely in that top tier of Bay Area employers. It might be the best value though, if you consider the culture and work/life balance. I'd rather work at LinkedIn than get paid a little more to work in a snake pit. :)

From a career development perspective, try to get on a team doing infrastructure work, especially backend work. Even as a top performer with big projects under your belt, the job responsibilities of a front-end feature developer just don't check the right boxes for a promotion.

From a day-to-day perspective, the development tools just aren't great. Mobile infra doesn't meet the needs of developers, working with them can be challenging, and certain areas are notably buggy. Even company-wide infrastructure like crash reporting and continuous integration is slow and unreliable.

If you are considering offers, know that LinkedIn doesn't do big stock refreshes like some other big companies in the area.

The on-call process is stressful. The apps are just too big and have too many contributors to put a single developer in charge of everything for a week. There are enough developers that you aren't on call very often, but the flip side of that is that you never really get the hang of it, and things are slightly different by the time you do it again.

• Hold infrastructure teams more accountable for what they provide.
• If the company has so much need for feature development, make sure your feature developers have a career path that's actually aligned with their work.
• Make the overall compensation a little more competitive.