Pros: Colleagues are invariably friendly, generous, and great to learn from and collaborate with. People (especially in the London office) are from all over the world with diverse backgrounds and life experiences. Work is challenging and stimulating, and generally quite varied. There's a need to be agile about strategy (always more to do than time to do it!), which is a good learning opportunity. The social side of things is pleasant, with some 'top down' events (well, before COVID anyway) and more 'organic' hanging out with colleagues. Pub, restaurants, board games, sports after work or at lunchtime, etc. Nothing is forced if some or all of those things aren't for you. Great office breakfast and lunch. Managers typically genuinely care about their direct reports' wellbeing and make an effort to provide challenging, interesting work and growth opportunities. While engineering is encouraged to proactively attend to real business and customer needs, most of the time the trust and autonomy are there to do things with quality and in a direction dictated by engineering experts. Engineers at all levels are expected to become experts and owners of the areas they work on. Stock incentives and bonuses have been very generous historically.

Cons: Work can be difficult, and the nature of the business gives a seasonality to things. Challenges and pressure can heat up in the approach to a Q4 of the year or a particularly big release. The frequent need to respond in an agile way to new opportunities and risks can be daunting and occasionally makes it harder to spend focus time really digging deep on a particular problem. Some of the higher-ups in sales can come over a bit self-congratulatory, but most of the time they're also actually good at what they do and good collaborators.

Pros: Culture is awesome and forefront of all our hiring, and it shows in the quality of the work environment and people in it. We have a flat structure that focuses on contribution over process. Management has the best vision of any company I've worked for, not just for the company, but the market. From an engineering perspective, we are pushing the limits of technology and working with the bleeding edge, making every day a ton of fun.

Cons: Training and mentoring is not super extensive or in-depth, which means that you need to swim or sink.

Pros: Great benefits (health insurance, mobile phone expenses, lunch in the office 3 days a week, drinks, Palooza - a massive 1-week long conference with parties and everything). Very stable company, secure job. Really good compensation, can't highlight that enough. Chance to work on a super high-loaded system. Great people with years and (sometimes) decades of experience; a lot of people work 5+ years at the company. Very good work-life balance.

Cons: Technically, it's a very rigid system, an old monolith with right-for-the-time decisions and very reluctant for any changes. A lot of red tape; you'll need numerous approvals for anything to get done (even code changes require code reviewers, SMEs' approvals, manager approval, and that does not even count for the release process, which is another level). A lot of re-orgs and re-structures, surprising for a company of this size. Most of the tech stack is quite rigid; most of the time it is .NET 4, MSSQL, and React, with not much variation. Introducing anything new is next to impossible; it is seen as unnecessary, dangerous, and always starts holy wars – very emotional and overheated discussions by very senior people (to a point of the CTO getting involved). This is adtech, so some people might find it unappealing. Processes borrow a lot of words from Agile ("agile teams", "scrum", "story points", "sprint", etc.), but in fact, it is just a waterfall which has nothing to do with Agile. Story points are abused (like X story points are substituted for a week of work; each team member could be assessed based on how many story points they have delivered in a given timeframe; no retros, planning sessions, or sprint reviews; people working in silos rather than as a team, etc.). Some management is not really managing people – not conducting 1:1s (or their agenda consists exclusively of work planning/task discussions), slacking on growth/performance reviews. Working in silos; that is, very little collaboration. People often work on a task (the size of a feature) alone, start to finish (design through release), which is good for honing responsibility, autonomy, and all that jazz, but it has its drawbacks. The monolith – the codebase is **enormous**. The setup requires an entire machine; running tests locally is often impossible.