Pros: Most PD employees are super nice and in general the company has tons of emotional intelligence. Lots of support for underrepresented groups, especially through employee resource groups. Good diversity stats compared to the industry and region (board and execs included). Managers go on-call too, not just line level workers. Work/life balance was quite reasonable, although it depends significantly on the team. Ask lots of questions about the on-call load for the specific team you're considering joining.

Cons: There is a strong tendency to cargo cult technical decisions and appeal to authority in discussions, which was probably exacerbated by... There is a cultural fear of being wrong, caused by a small group in engineering who treat every interaction as a battle to be won. It wasn't uncommon for people to express fear of asking questions in certain channels out of fear of one of these people (or their emulators) making them feel stupid. The engineering department probably wastes half its budget redoing work to use increasingly niche technologies as top engineers' interests meander. Most valuable stuff is owned by a team and a rotation, so if you're not a manager or lead, opportunities for individual ownership can be limited, which can make career growth challenging beyond the early career.

Pros: - Emphasizes learning and growth, and supports engineers in making it happen. - Blameless culture, from incident postmortems and beyond - the focus is on learning and preventing future problems, rather than pinning blame. - Organizational willingness to take calculated risks with new technology, whether it's infrastructure tech, programming languages, or libraries. - Engineering strives to appropriately balance moving quickly against technical risk. - Smart engineers who get things done. - No jerks allowed - being candid yet empathetic is a core value here. - DevOps culture - you build it, you deploy it and run it in production.

Cons: - Some services, libraries, and tools are legacy, and balancing paying down this tech debt with new feature work can be a challenge. - Focus shifted from engineering excellence to product/feature work to (occasionally) too great an extent. This seems to be shifting back somewhat, so hopefully a happy, sustainable middle ground is settled upon.

Pros: There are so many pros. The culture is fantastic. The *people* are phenomenal. The work-life balance and flexibility is incredible. PagerDuty being a remote-first company on top of all that is the cherry on top. Good communication and teamwork are valued here. Everyone is always willing to answer questions patiently and without judgement. Incidents and incident reviews are truly blameless. That is unheard of in other tech spaces. There is a lot of opportunity for career growth here for engineers. There is a big emphasis on internal promotions. Engineering promotions are always well-deserved. Everyone wants to see everyone succeed. The benefits in general are great: very generous PTO and leave policy, RSUs and an ESPP program, 401k matching, generous HSA contributions, and more. The diversity here is unmatched for a tech company and equity/inclusion initiatives are noticeable and appreciated.

Cons: A lot of the things that made PagerDuty great are slowly being chipped away. I'm calling this out because I love PagerDuty and I want it to be better. We used to have a mid-year wellness week where every single employee went on a company-paid vacation, all at the same time. This was the single greatest thing. Everyone would brag about this to anyone who would listen. There used to be a wellness day every month (started during COVID) where everyone had the day off at the same time. Just like the mid-year wellness week, this ensured everyone was able to rest and no one felt like they needed to go online and catch up on missed messages. There are 5 fewer wellness days now. The mid-year wellness break and the many wellness days were so loved and are very missed. While we still have winter hibernation (this is now company-paid) and we have only lost one week total in company-paid (non-PTO) time off... it feels like two weeks total. We used to have two hackweeks a year; we are now down to one a year. Hackweeks encourage innovation and creativity; they interrupt the monotony of work. They spark new ideas and foster a collaborative environment. These are values every tech company should be championing. The highly sought-after and competitive internship program (CAP) was paused indefinitely. This was such an important pipeline for inbound talent and really put PagerDuty on the map as CAP was open to career-changers and not just recent grads. Pausing the internship program seems short-sighted. Our organization's internal convention was slated to be an in-person event but that was also cut and a hybrid model was attempted. If you were near an office, you were welcome to come in... if you were not, you had to attend virtually. This disparate experience left a sour taste in the mouth of a lot of remote folks who had no ability to visit an office, no travel budget, no opportunities to build rapport with coworkers. Layoffs in January 2023, which felt unnecessary and also short-sighted, have brought down morale further. We keep hearing "the macro" but it truly seemed that we did layoffs because every other company was doing layoffs at that time. The way it was handled was terrible, and I'm not sure morale has recovered since.