Pros: - Good work life balance, and most people work < 8 hours a day - Unlimited vacation that gets borderline abused - Work by yourself on a project and deliver it in isolation (which is a con as well) - Good food, and decent benefits - Good top level exec leaders - People who are generally inoffensive

Cons: - Engineers don't match Tier 1 company caliber. They don't care if you do something right, just that it gets done and shipped. I haven't yet met a truly passionate individual who I can learn from. - Engineers look out for themselves. They won't go out of their way to help you. It's each one for themselves. - Managers don't care about your career growth or learning or you as an individual - only if you have delivered on your OKRs. They provide almost no support in career development. As long as you get your work done, that's good enough for them. - Management counts on one or two individuals to do all the work. The rest of us are backup dancers, figuratively speaking. - Lack of clear future looking goals and vision. C suite level leaders are good, but mid to low level management is overworked, lacks direction, lacks transparency, and is totally uninspiring. - Company only cares about moving the needle on business metrics. Developer experience and ensuring good engineering practices are at the end of the priority list. Don't waste your time on that "useless" stuff. - Pay is on the stingier side. - Not a fun culture. Polite small talk is the extent of friendships here.

Pros: Meaningful problems to solve and stock upside with the right macro. Aggressive AI usage.

Cons: 996 / hustle culture amongst newer folks. Love having motivated teammates, but the comp is B-tier at best (unless you’re the CEO, at 4371x the avg employee). New product folks are a mixed bag. Some work really hard and are super sharp. Some talk about working hard and take credit for product work from others. SF office dying through firing and resignations - expect to be asked to visit Miami and Toronto frequently. Tenured employees seem to be assumed to be low performers.

Pros: I'm constantly impressed by coworkers. It's awesome to glean experience from people with varied backgrounds, such as mortgage-backed securities, the Fed, OpenAI, and math and physics PhDs. Amazing company growth without sacrificing culture. We have a bunch of off-sites to make sure everyone stays connected. Very collaborative culture. Able to maintain a sense of ownership without "turf". Quite open to cross-team collaboration. I like that company OKR cycles are 2 months instead of quarterly. This gives us freedom to insert a hackathon, takes some pressure off the winter holidays, and keeps us iterating more quickly. Great office environment and office management.

Cons: I'm looking forward to more engineering leadership. I love that we've promoted from within, but current EMs are still gaining experience.