Pros: I worked at Yelp for several years and will always miss the people. Yelp felt very family-like: friendly and open-minded folks with good communication throughout. These are folks you would want to hang out with on the weekends, like BFFs. In fact, I might be spoiled by them; I now expect the same kind of warmth and friendliness from future employers and colleagues. Good supply of snacks and drinks. The current office (140 New Montgomery) is beautifully done, though might be a little too spread-out for some areas. Average compensation, though the benefits (401k, health insurance) are pretty average. From the engineering side, the codebase is so old and badly written in many places that, depending on what team you're on and the kind of challenges you fancy, this can be a godsend (you love fixing things) or a curse (you love new stuff). I might have a long list of cons below, but I still would recommend Yelp.

Cons: I feel like Yelp may be over-reaching on its core values. They have a vision, for sure, but it's a very broad vision and not very focused. The higher-ups tend to wear rose-colored glasses when discussing company statistics. I wish they were a little more humble and frank. Also, at times the company seems risk-averse. Expanding to other countries: no problem. Delivering a better user experience: jump through bureaucratic hurdles. Certain projects can take years of planning and back-and-forth because they really don't want to lose users or revenue, however small that may be, and/or managers keep leaving. Innovation takes a backseat. Previously, I mentioned the codebase. It's so ugly that implementing innovative features is an absolute chore. Deploying code is done serially through a person rather than an automated parallel system, which became a huge bottleneck when the engineering department grew astronomically in the past couple of years. Lastly, growth. The company is growing fast, and not really in a good way. I can only speak for the engineering department, and it grew a lot during my time there. Unfortunately, the industry-experts:new-grads ratio is very low. As a result, you'll get one-year Yelp employees mentoring new hires, and sometimes, a one-year employee ends up as manager. Not that that employee doesn't deserve it, but there are still two- and three-year folks around, and they get passed over.

Pros: I came to Yelp right out of college and learned a ton. I worked closely with engineers who each had varying degrees of experience, but the vast majority were very thoughtful and willing to take time to chat about whatever problem/design I wanted feedback on.

Cons: The biggest con was that it didn't feel like Yelp as a company actually helps restaurants. Negative reviews can really tank a business, and people give these away like candy for arbitrary reasons. It didn't feel great about what I was contributing toward. * Hostility from teams which acted as gatekeepers at Yelp (for example, the Database Reliability Team). Lots of rules pinned in their Slack channels describing how to interact with them, and you get roasted or ignored if you don't follow them. * Many team reorganizations. * Cross-team collaboration was chaos.

Pros: Work/life balance: you can walk out free of mind when your day is over. Collaborative work culture: no politics within Engineering. Working on a high visibility/popular consumer app.

Cons: Too few sick days. Too few PTO days. No sizable corporate shutdowns during holidays. Poor 401k contribution. Don't pay top dollar; poor stock performance lately. Offers the minimum legal family leave, but was once a leader in the domain. HQ is surrounded by homelessness and pee smell.