Pros: Nice mission. The mission hasn't changed throughout the years, and it's still one of the coolest mission statements for new companies out there. Company comp and benefits have kept improving on the last few years.

Cons: Culture is slowly diluting as the company focuses on over-indexing on hiring folks from FAANG that clearly don't care about the mission but rather the promise of an up-and-coming IPO.

Pros: Amazing creative energy permeates the entire company. People make art and music, write, draw, dance, stream, and create. Many did so professionally before working at Patreon, and some continue those careers alongside. If you're the creative type, there's nothing else like working here. Following from that: a real commitment to creators. Many of us here have friends who rely on Patreon for a living, and others know first-hand what it was like to do so, so we understand the responsibility that working here entails. Well-built and maintained development tools exist in some areas, especially for a startup. Need to reproduce a bug reported by a creator? Impersonate them on prod without the risk of affecting their data. Want to canary a change before committing? A simple Slack command.

Cons: Patreon feels like a much larger and much older software company than it actually is. There is so much legacy code, and inertia against new patterns/architecture leads to straightforward (on the surface) projects becoming bogged down by too many stakeholders. Your ability to get things done hinges on the influence that your EM or Director has in the overall org. Diversity and inclusion is talked about a lot and often feels like second nature (and there's no song and dance about it, pun intended). But all the work done in ERGs is done by the people affected, with very little systemic support and no appetite by management to actually make big changes. If you're in an under-represented group (like I am), be prepared to do all the labor yourself while leadership pats itself on the back about how great the DEI culture is. Overuse of in-house code that nobody really understands for functionality that could be easily accomplished using open-source libraries. This is a legacy problem that's changing, but not quickly (see inertia above). If TDD or anything testing-heavy is in your development style, you're unfortunately going to have a bad time.

Pros: There are a lot of kind and creative people at Patreon.

Cons: Patreon has been struggling with strategy since the beginning. My time there started six months after a large layoff. Six months later, I was laid off in a big release of engineering talent, following a "fat billion-dollar valuation." Three months later, they were hiring again. A year later, they announced another large layoff and then started hiring again.