Pros: Lots of random perks. Pretty relaxed office.

Cons: Much of the work was rather boring. The feel of the office was like it was still trying to be a cool startup when it really is just a corporate enterprise.

Pros: The perks are great. There is a really good benefits package (medical/dental/etc.), and then a ton of stuff to keep employees happy at the main Newton campus: * Catered lunches * Sodas * Snacks * Foosball * Gaming systems * A kegerator The list goes on. Pretty much everyone I worked with was very bright. The bar to get in is set pretty high, and there is an informal 'no a**holes policy' that is fairly effective (though opinions on this may vary based on your own definition). Their development methodology is better than a lot of larger engineering groups. The company motto 'Speed Wins' continues to be applied to a development group that has grown by a ridiculous amount for the past few years (also a con, see below), and fortunately things are still moving quickly. Work/life balance is good. There are rarely any (as in, I never personally experienced any) crunch-time periods on projects. The CEO knows what he's doing and is leading the company in a good direction.

Cons: If you're a Java developer and enjoy writing code like it's 1997, by all means join the development team! The codebase is a mess. It has grown organically over the last decade or so and is unwieldy and not well architected, therefore harder to understand and maintain. The coverage of the testing frameworks that are in place is nowhere near where it should be, and so very little refactoring happens to improve the situation. Traditional singletons are everywhere. There are methods that are thousands of lines long. It's a jungle. To some extent, there is a "not-invented-here" mindset; bringing in 3rd party code isn't encouraged and must be approved by management. People who are hired are smart and expected to write code that works, but they don't necessarily know how to write clean code that is maintainable, and management doesn't put much value on that either. As mentioned in the 'pros' section, development is still approached like the company is a five-person startup. This works to varying degrees with a team 20x that size. There's no real methodology backing it (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.). This contributes to the existing mess of code. The bar for entry into the company is set pretty high; the interview process is pretty tough, and candidates are expected to have a very strong CS background. During interviews, the company is presented as a really interesting place to work with a lot of tough software challenges around scalability. This gets a lot of people excited, but the reality is much less dramatic. It seems that a lot of really bright people come through the door only to end up with pretty menial work, often maintaining a mess of code that was written up in a hurry by someone else.

Pros: Everyone in engineering is extremely sharp and capable. This is a great place to get some hands-on web development experience on a large and complex site. You will be writing server-side code that must scale to handle millions of requests, not just CSS/JavaScript when I say web development. The engineering philosophy is to encourage all engineers to handle all layers in the stack, so you will be writing CSS and JavaScript, in addition to backend code. This cuts both ways. It's really interesting when you're starting out because you will learn a lot and feel a great sense of ownership over the entire project you're working on, but after a while, you might decide there are parts of the stack that you'd prefer not to work on. My compensation was pretty good when I started, and I got a nice merit raise after a year. Your engineering co-workers will be fun to work with and more than willing to pull their weight. I didn't encounter any dead weight while I was working there. The hiring process seems to do a good job filtering out under-qualified and under-performing candidates.

Cons: The interviewing process is very heavy on algorithms and data structures questions, which might make you believe that those are the kind of problems you'll be encountering on a daily basis. This really isn't the case. Trip needs to hire really smart people because there is a very large, 10+ year old codebase. Often, a project will require making changes or additions to parts of this complex web of interconnected classes. Basically, it helps to be a genius if you want to read the code and understand it. The interviewing process also serves as an excellent weeding-out mechanism, but many of the recent grad hires don't really have any real coding experience, so the maintainability of the code they write leaves something to be desired. The reality of working here as an engineer is that because they want you to work on the entire stack for every project, you will be writing a non-trivial amount of CSS and JavaScript. At first, if you're like me and never did that kind of work before, you'll learn a lot. But after a while, you might get tired of trying to position a page element and making the styles look correct in IE6. There are some projects that are heavier on this than others, and your mileage may vary based on the group you're on. After a while, if you realize there are parts of the stack you'd like to avoid, it becomes difficult to avoid them. Changing groups is something that is discussed as a viable option, but it's pretty difficult from what I saw. Your manager might try to take these preferences into account, but you will not be able to escape IE6 display bugs if you're in a group that works on any user-facing code. If you're completely opposed to doing any client-side work, don't work here, or make sure you're being hired into a group that never does live site work. The management hierarchy is flat (but growing taller), which means that your chances for advancement aren't super-promising. You can see some people being groomed, shaking the right hands and playing politics correctly to be promoted into the lower management layer. I wasn't striving to be a middle manager in a 100+ person engineering department, and if you want to stay on the coding side of the fence, there aren't really many places to go. They hire startup-minded people, so churn is inevitable. If you're smart (and you are if you get hired here), you'll probably be intellectually challenged for a year or two, learn a lot, and write code that millions of people will use daily. But after that, you will probably get bored and want to move on. The nature of the skills they help you develop makes you well-suited to work at a startup because you've worked on all parts of the web development stack and you're now familiar with lots of the non-engineering aspects of creating and maintaining a profitable website.