Pros: I say it's the best "first" job because by being expected to work on the full stack, and being surrounded by the most intelligent and helpful people you will ever meet, you learn a ton of software engineering skills very quickly. Also, I want to note that in the time I've been here, the company has been growing quite a bit, and some of us had started getting concerned about losing some important parts of our culture. Upper management took this issue very seriously. The CEO himself set aside a lot of time to chat with us in a small group setting about specific aspects of the culture that we felt were important to maintain. I'm not sure exactly how much an hour of his time is worth in company dollars, but it absolutely solidified my company spirit. We're getting bigger, but not too big to care about the little things.

Cons: There was a time earlier this year when things got hectic. It was not a good time. I think that has passed. Let's hope it doesn't happen again. (Then again, I suppose there are a lot of companies out there which constantly have that level of stress.)

Pros: - A great place to learn coding style conventions, scoping of large projects, and many other skills necessary for software engineering careers. - Free lunch. - Great place to network with engineers. Lots of startups in the area are founded by ex-TripAdvisor employees.

Cons: - Little opportunity for advancement, and the company badly attempts to hide this by promising more opportunities 'if you work hard.' - Vague guidelines for how to properly utilize the engineering rotation. - Extremely poor management of technical debt. - Outdated technological stack, and senior management is resistant to change. - Tolerance of management/groups that are uncommunicative and insular. - The HR department is behind the times. - Very little standardization of technology between groups or even employees. Having employees configure their own dev boxes is a prime example that costs enormous amounts of productivity for minimal learning gains. - The codebase is collapsing under its own weight. To their credit, they hired a senior engineer solely to mitigate this issue. When I left the company, morale was quite low. Not only are there very few senior roles available, it is not attractive to take a senior role because the technologies and design philosophy are falling behind industry standards, hobbling the ability to jump to other companies or even to change position within the company.

Pros: Remote, full-time. Decent pay and WLB.

Cons: Not much technical growth. Poor work culture.