Pros: Great benefits, and yearly bonuses can equal or exceed your salary. This company is at the nexus of the PC game business, so your work can have a big impact if you carefully choose the right project and people to work with.

Cons: Placing any bets on a long-term career at this random and cliquish company is probably as wise as betting all your life savings on a single spin of a roulette wheel in Vegas. At this point, Valve has devolved into a place you work at to pad your resume and make some bonus cash. Be prepared to be let down once you're inside. The basic idea of Valve works well with small (30-50 person) companies, but utterly fails to scale to a company with hundreds of people. The board and their closest friends have become extremely wealthy, so they have very little incentive to fix the company. This organization has a purposely opaque, hierarchical, secretive, and very rigid management structure. Many of the board of directors and their friends are utterly capricious and conceited. The longer an employee is at Valve, the more they singularly focus on protecting their yearly bonuses, and the less they care about basically everything else. Some projects can go on literally for 5+ years, wandering around pointlessly without shipping, with little to no direction and no accountability. This company is terrible at writing and shipping large-scale software and sneers at words like "software engineering," "architecture," and "testing." The random mass firings of 2013 tanked morale, and the stream of talent leaving the company during 2014 didn't help. The yearly review process lacks feedback, transparency, and coverage. This company has no formal HR, so good luck if you need to give genuine feedback about troublesome coworkers.

Pros: - No bureaucracy. - Generous compensation. - Ample opportunities to take part in major decision-making. - You can trust your coworkers to also do a good job. - Coworkers are smart and hilarious. - Employee count is small and constant; very little turnover.

Cons: - Communication is bad if you don't make an active effort yourself. - Everyone's terrible at time estimation and scheduling.

Pros: You get to work with the smartest people in the industry. You get to take on as much responsibility as you are capable of. You get to directly influence and make decisions about product direction. No one else has the authority to force you into a decision you don't agree with. Compensation and benefits are amazing.

Cons: You will be held to very high standards. Having to take on more responsibility and make higher-level product decisions can mean additional pressure and stress versus more narrow roles at other companies.