The Trade Desk

The pay in Sydney is pretty decent. For the same level, I'd definitely pick this over Canva or Atlassian, and depending on stock price, etc., it's up there with Google compensation. If you want more money as an engineer, you pretty much need to win the startup lottery or be in HFT.

I personally find my colleagues charming and warm. I think the Sydney engineering office is really friendly. Some people keep to themselves, but there's a good number of people who will chat to anyone who is around, and it's nice.

(Pro for some) Yearly whole-company trip/convention. Pretty lit.

I get a lot of autonomy and trust in terms of how I build things.

Honestly, C# isn't that bad anymore. As a language, it's really nice. All of the stuff I work on now is on .NET Core, and most of the stuff I work on runs on Linux/Mac nicely too. So the codebase is old/slow/weighty in parts, but it's not moribund and stuck there.

Teams are distributed, even within a team. This is nice because someone is always awake and around who can help, and everything is done remotely.

It's ad-tech, but they do their best to try and jolly things along and focus on interoperability, standards, open-source, and the "open internet".

There seemed to be a big divide about return-to-office. I'm happy to be in the office, but some people really don't want to come in, and recently a bunch of them got fired for not doing the 3 days a week in-office.

I am sad for those folks, since they seemed very passionate about working from home, but I don't view it very negatively personally since it's always been very clear what the requirement was, and I accepted that when I was hired.

I've noticed some teams suffer a lot more than others; in terms of deadlines, ops responsibilities, manager pettiness, working late. I don't really experience any of these things, and they don't seem super-common, but they are present in some places from what I can see.

If you're gonna make me fly places, please don't make it economy :')

C# may be nice, but I don't really like ASP.

Teams are distributed, even within a team. This is bad because if you're outside the USA it's hard to have growth - there's no country-specific domain you can start to excel in. The USA folks will always suck up any attention and opportunities. Also, not enough meeting rooms, so people annoy the heck out of me by taking meetings at their desk.

It's ad-tech 🤷🏻‍♀️

The flip-side of the "silos are bad" coin is "specialization is good". The communication overhead of everything being smeared across every office is really starting to increase.

Re: business. I know you love enterprise customers and they're so great and all, but to achieve the next level of scale you need to have a self-service offering.