Pros: Some fun people work there. It's rewarding to help artists. That's about it.

Cons: Leadership here is a huge problem. Executives are in two camps -- the ones who started the company with Jack (the CEO) are untouchable, no matter how under-qualified or incompetent they are. When Patreon needs to hire VPs from outside the company, they conduct long and expensive searches that culminate in underwhelming candidates. Those new VPs have a shelf life of 6-24 months before they're fired or pushed out. They're generally not able to accomplish anything meaningful in that time. The truly bad ones sow chaos and discontent -- and Patreon has hired some very bad VPs. The result is that certain crucial leadership roles turn over very frequently, sometimes multiple times a year. At Patreon, I worked under the most toxic managers and skip-levels of my entire career. Charisma and 'visibility' are rewarded above all else. Managers steal credit for the work of ICs and throw them under the bus when it's convenient. Executives harangue you about how you're not working hard enough, but wouldn't know what to do with you if you worked a 12-hour day. Strategy is muddled and vague. The product is dated, janky, and buggy. Leadership avoids confronting real problems in favor of papering them over, and people who speak frankly about issues are ignored, punished, or pushed out. Many managers are ineffective or even despised by their reports. The company operates in a constant crisis mode, and there's always some new fire that needs to be extinguished. It's an intensely political workplace, and it's not uncommon for beloved, long-time employees to be randomly fired because they lost some opaque power struggle. Often, those employees are women of color. Employee turnover is incredibly high and morale is quite low. I would not advise joining this company.

Pros: - Strong engineering culture - Lots of ownership - Modern tech stack

Cons: Two days a week in the office (honestly not much, so not much of a con).

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.