Uber

Great mission: we help empower millions of people to earn extra income and to reliably get to where they need to be.

Strong engineering culture: lots of autonomy, solid engineering processes, supportive co-workers, tight feedback loops, lots of innovation and re-invention. Check out the engineering blog to get a better idea.

Lots of energy: it's great to work with people who are energetic, driven, overcome obstacles, and get things done.

Transparency: lots of communication from management and various business units, easy access to technical information that helps get work done.

Opportunities for learning: the company encourages and supports learning by having regular tech talks, online and in-person classes, access to an online library, as well as blameless postmortems. Lots of smart co-workers to learn from.

Management: the engineering management understands pretty well what the task of management is (building team, establishing values and culture, aligning priorities). There is very little micromanagement and politics; all interactions are professional and respectful.

Compensation and WLB: strong compared to other companies I worked at. There is a pretty consistent compensation and promotion process.

Constant apologizing, both internally and externally, gets tiring and demoralizing.

Company is not treated fairly by the media; lots of exaggerated bad publicity.

Company strategy should be driven by first principles and market feedback, not by the media cycle.