Pros: The stock will be worth a lot one day.

Cons: There is only one engineering office, and that is in New York City. There are engineers in other offices, but they are not recognized to be part of anything and are actively discouraged. Engineers in other offices used to be given false hopes of being able to contribute. Until recently, management has come clean and told you outright that New York personnel are being promoted instead of you because they are in New York.

Pros: All of my managers have been great, empathetic, and very technical. I have a lot of faith in the entire leadership chain, from me to the CTO. I think the C-suite makes responsible decisions. I think there's a lot of transparency with us. My work here as a SWE is very interesting, with some very unique problems. Very few engineers get to use as much from their computer science degrees as we do here.

Cons: I would like even more food in the office.

Pros: In the words of a friend I recently asked to come to our new top-floor Sussex St Chinatown office for interviews: “The people here are really switched on.” In their spare time, they work on being allies and advancing the causes of gender equality, building artificial endocrine systems, playing amazing board games I have not even heard of, table tennis, women’s groups, escape rooms, MIT puzzles challenges, skunkworks, sustainability – all of which dwarfs my teamwork in successfully defending a world championship with UNSW Computer Science and Engineering in teaching robots to play soccer, with no human intervention and no remote control; or advancing the cause of mathematics education via building out a step-by-step platform for ideas worth spreading, like “Should we be paying our kids to do their maths homework?”

Cons: A long-term focus on thinking big and going far. Please don't apply at MongoDB if you aren't expecting to be with MongoDB for the four-year contract.