Meta

For those who appreciate a bottom-up engineering culture, this place is great. People throw together (hack) prototypes, and the most successful ones win. Everything is about the results. Things like documentation and reliability, which some engineers bristle against, are secondary. Bureaucracy is nonexistent.

Engineers who prefer a more "design first" style will find it infuriating.

The "don't talk to me unless you've got a prototype in hand" culture can feel like it's stifling ideas, even though it's a very reasonable reaction against pie-in-the-sky proposals. Proper architecture and code quality can be big problems.

There's a strong emphasis on social networking as a means of getting things done. For introverts, this can be unduly difficult, and even for extroverts, it can come across as a triumph of personality and schmoozing over sound engineering principles. There is a strong emphasis on trying to fabricate relationships in order to have impact, which can feel extremely deceitful.