Pros: Open area. Start-up environment. Free to ask anyone, including the CTO, about your challenges.

Cons: The team assignment is quite strange. I have a strong system programming background, but my manager let me do front-end development.

Pros: Good compensation and benefits. Not a sweatshop.

Cons: A place where arrogance, elitism, and know-it-alls became the only way to thrive. This caused all the really good engineers that are fun to work with to leave. Sadly, a place where good ideas go to die. The only way the execs seem to try to innovate is by acquiring companies, and they fail at it. Stock value is still in the same range as the IPO: a litmus test of the failed vision. The product was great, but the tech is old, and the world has moved on from external storage arrays.

Pros: Smart, hardworking colleagues who make time to answer questions have helped me grow immensely as a software engineer. An atmosphere of progress instead of blame – the question when things go wrong is "How do we fix it?" rather than "Who did this?". Plenty of interesting projects and room for growth, though I caution anyone unfamiliar with enterprise software: projects take a lot more time when you can't release a hacky version, as customer trust is valued incredibly highly here. Great teams across all functions of the company make me proud to work here. Sales does not lie to customers, Marketing shows honest numbers, and Ops has not faltered one bit in the face of meteoric growth.

Cons: You have to work hard. Work-life balance is hard during crunch times. They don't happen often, but I do wind up sacrificing some of my personal life to get the job done. It's software; nothing new here. We don't change teams/projects as often as before.