Pros: Free lunch and dinner, though it's usually some gross slop takeout. The company is located on Castro Street, so there are a bunch of lunch options.

Cons: Pure has gone IPO and now it's going to have difficulty justifying the below-industry base pay and lack of bonuses to its employees. Flash storage is a commodity market and it's a race to the bottom, so don't believe the hype around stock options. The senior management are recycled from typical storage companies like EMC, NetApp, and HP. They like to talk about radical transparency, but the reality is that Engineering is playing catch-up on basic storage features like replication. They just happen to be in a business where the competitors are more incompetent than they are. It's rapidly getting bloated (look at the burn rate) and they will have a hard time hiring talent from other, more innovative Silicon Valley companies. They also love to hire and fire, but it's usually about drinking the Kool-Aid. Being a good engineer who questions the way things are done will get you fired.

Pros: Well-funded and filled with very intelligent people. The company is very open and clearly cares about the well-being of its employees. The product is great and it is selling like hotcakes. It's going to be a hard job to take on the big boys of the storage world, but Pure Storage is doing all the right things to make that happen. The work itself involves solving complex problems while working with the large but finite resources of the array. All the software is optimized to work on the (known) target platform, but that does mean that you have to understand the hardware as well as the software, which increases the challenge (I wouldn't have it any other way). Being well-funded also means that we have enough resources to do our job, and I have been impressed by the amount of hardware that is continuously being used by automated tests. These automated tests are designed to (and do) find bugs as soon as they are checked in (if not before). There is a strong focus on making sure all the tests pass (and the LCD display showing the tests is all green). This focus impressed me during my interview and is a strong positive for the company going forward. We are all strongly motivated to ensure that it doesn't light up red due to one of our changes!

Cons: Very few, but it is a start-up, and the hours can be long, so you need to be prepared for that. The free food keeps coming, and that isn't helping my waistline. The office is open-plan, so noise can be a problem at times.

Pros: Interesting projects, skilled teammates, and well-above-average conditions.

Cons: Unstable processes, quite a few crunches.