Roku

Roku has software engineering work in many areas, and it often competes against much bigger companies. There is always important work to be done and a need to do it better. If you thrive in such an environment, then this company is for you. In many ways, the teams operate like a start-up, but with the resources of a mature company and some benefits.

There is no time-consuming regular peer review of dubious usefulness; you just chat with your manager. There is no limited PTO policy either. As long as you get work done, and your manager and team are fine with it, take time off work and spend that time with your family.

I've been here for a few years, and I am fortunate that all my managers have been highly technical and competent people, and they embrace Roku's way of self-managing and providing feedback.

Anyone with an account can assign a bug to you, instead of your manager acting as a load balancer.

There is also a rather steep learning curve to get started as an engineer. It may be a little miserable for the first few weeks, especially if you have a hard time adapting to Roku's way of doing things. This way is very specific to the company, and some of this experience isn't something that you can easily bring with you to another company.

For example, Roku uses a proprietary scripting language called BrightScript that isn't widely used outside of Roku's ecosystem. This is one of the first things you have to learn.

Don't make all employees insiders and impose on them long security trading black-out windows.