OpenTable

Extremely great work-life balance, and I'm almost shocked to read others who wrote that as a con. Most of the employees in SF have families and tend to leave around 6pm every day.

Almost all my colleagues are super friendly and great to work with. Plus, we're all foodies! I've never found so many great places to eat in the city than during my time here at OpenTable.

There's a lot of passion for making the best restaurant experience. Everyone from the bottom of the company really believes in the mission.

With that said, where do I begin with the cons? First off, the CEO is hardly around and makes bizarre low-level decisions without entrusting of his direct reports.

Another exec is completely out of touch with their org other than a couple projects that interest them. This makes communication a gigantic hurdle and employee promotions a struggle.

Another team came in from an acquisition with an extremely toxic employee who insults everyone around them, causing stress and damaging to the culture, and still manages to get praised by the exec team.

We have a very tiny budget for anything that increases employee happiness. Only a few employees have standing desks, and there's only a couple boxes of fruit for 400+ employees, and we share low quality Costco sugar snacks. The office manager does care about this problem, but there's little they can do given the unreasonable constraint on budget.

Every quarter there's some new mission that's completely different from the last quarter. So ultimately there's just no long-term planning for the company. A company like OpenTable needs a 3 to 5 year plan of action, but instead we're always so focused on the now.

Communication between all the levels of the company is also extremely poor. I'm always amazed at how in the dark people are about very important things.