Pros: - Friendly office atmosphere - High impact projects - 1-on-1 mentor support

Cons: - Lack of code documentation

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: - Talented and genuine coworkers -- my direct teammates and manager were all helpful and smart. - The mission is easy to get behind, although it's harder to justify a "second renaissance" in this day and age where many other platforms with bigger moats are providing good-enough alternatives. - Top compensation with a high cash component, competitive with other tech unicorns that pay top of band -- although the equity component is pretty overvalued.

Cons: - Lacking medium- and long-term focus. Projects and overarching objectives change very often (sometimes multiple times in the span of a couple of months) without much transparency from leadership. This is expected at a growing company, but the whiplash at Patreon was significantly worse than other (smaller) startups I've worked at. - Has most of the growing pains of a startup without many of the positives. Significant effort is required to get projects started, and developer velocity is slow due to lack of tooling and observability. It's difficult to build confidence for any reasonably sized change. - Lots of areas are lacking an owner, and tech debt isn't prioritized, which dampens velocity. - Ever-looming risk of layoffs (since they've already happened a few times in the company's history).