Snap

• Lunches were provided daily in the office from decent fast-food restaurants nearby.

• Good compensation & benefits. But as others have mentioned, a lot of your pay is based on RSUs. Plan on joining the company when the stock price is relatively low (e.g., $7/share) and don't expect it to go up much (maybe $11/share). A lot of the nice perks were rolled back too because they knew they could.

• I got lucky and joined a great team while I was here that was fairly insulated from Snap's culture. I was able to work on some very cool projects that made a significant impact on the team's cost. Those results have made for great bullet points on my resume that have gotten the attention of many hiring managers.

• I worked under a good tech lead, manager, and director that thankfully set me up for success. Unfortunately, none of them are there anymore.

• Nice office location. Snap's Seattle office is in Market Place Tower. It has a beautiful view of Pike Place Market, Mt. Rainier, and the Space Needle.

• Wide variety of snacks available in the cafeteria area.

• I worked with a lot of very nice and smart people while working here. I received some good mentorship because of it.

• There were diversity programs that seemed pretty good if that's important to you.

Snapchat's ad recommendation service is still bad after all this time compared to TikTok and Instagram. Those social media apps are eating deeply into Snap's ad revenue.

I personally thought the company's practice of doing "councils" where you would sit in a circle on the group with your team and talk about something. Though I understood some people hated it when it was something in the way of completing tight deadlines on projects.

Your experience is going to depend heavily on the team that you're on. I was fortunate and landed on an amazing team for the majority of my time here.

I survived 2 major layoffs while working here. One was 20% when I just joined and another 10% of the company that impacted me.

The CEO & co-founder of the company, Evan, deserves his low rating on Glassdoor. He doesn't know how to run a company except to hire people in leadership who do. He never takes responsibility for any initiative that he drives but instead blames his employees for failing to "execute" his "sound vision."

Quarantine benefits such as $60/week for food were cut and replaced with food in office. This was a really popular benefit with people.

Quarterly performance reviews replaced annual ones. It doesn't leave room for long-term projects when business impact is expected every 3 months.

I noticed a lot of teams had to deal with code red tasks. These seemed to be a constant for them and likely caused burnout.

4-day mandatory RTO. You might have to commute to an office where your team is at, even if another Snap office is closer to you.

No voting power on your RSUs. All voting power is held by the co-founders. I'm fairly certain if it wasn't that way, shareholders would have voted them out by now.

Like most company leadership, don't trust what they say. I only watched leadership Q&A sessions for the snarky comments on Blind.

I was laid off and they generously let me keep my work laptop when I was let go. I was also given 4 months of severance including money for my insurance and benefits.

Snap's flying selfie drone was a disaster. It was a big push by the company and ultimately ended with all 71,000 of them being recalled because of the fire-hazard risk from the batteries. Take a look at the CPSC recall listing and see for yourself. If Snap wants to be seen as a brand with quality products, then they have to work with quality manufacturers.

The CEO's push for AR glasses was a complete joke. It was hyped up for so long and considered to be a moonshot by the CEO. Take a look at them, compare them to Meta's Orion AR glasses offering, then ask yourself which one you'd wear. The team that works on the hardware side has their own private rooms to develop because Evan sees it as so secretive.

From what I know from the mobile development folks, my understanding is that they're still using Objective-C (instead of Swift) for the Apple version of Snapchat.

You're not going to listen, so I'm not going to even bother.