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: Great environment. Amazing people. Everyone there is willing to help you get on your feet and start coding. They all come off as friendly and helpful, and you fit in in no time. A lot of the time, you will either be on IRC chatting with fellow coworkers about life, or setting up some after-work activity. The environment is laid back, and the only real motivating factor was seeing how much your fellow co-worker did the previous day, since there weren't really any set deadlines to get a project done.

Cons: Had a long commute, but other than that, everything was incredible. No complaints.

Pros: Yelp has an awesome company culture. It is a fun, open, and challenging work environment. There is a lot I could say, so I'll just start putting down bullet points: * Excellent company values, particularly "play well with others." Most engineers at Yelp are friendly, helpful, and pretty easy to work with. Sure, there are some employees that don't adhere to this value, but in my experience, many of these folks end up leaving Yelp. * Great benefits. In addition to the standard health/dental, Yelp provides up to $60 per month for their wellness program, that can be used for gyms or other fitness activities. Additionally, the company has 3 two-day hackathons each year, where the engineers can work on whatever project they want. And, there are 4 "off-sites" each year where each engineering team goes to do something fun together, and 2 company-wide events per year. * A very open and accepting work culture. There were people at Yelp from so many different backgrounds. E.g., during lunch, a Muslim engineer would silently perform one of his daily prayers in the corner of the kitchen, and everybody was cool with that. In 2015, Yelp officially participated in the SF pride parade. Yelp has at least a couple of engineers with noticeable impairments and does a great job helping them to be happy, successful members of the team. * Tons of awesome events, including learning lunches on Fridays (and sometimes Mondays too) with presentations on cool eclectic topics, movie nights, trivia nights, board games nights, women engineering groups, a variety of meetup events (e.g., Python, machine learning), and more! * Management is very open to ideas and supportive of work done by engineers. If you think of a cool, challenging project that benefits the company, chances are that you'll get to work on it. I was not looking for another job when I left Yelp, and it was a tough decision to leave this company. I've worked or interned at 5 companies now, and I have been the happiest at Yelp.

Cons: There aren't many cons to working at Yelp as an engineer. However, now that the company is fairly big (4000-5000 employees), you cannot realistically expect rapid career advancement as you would at a successful, small startup unless you work really hard (I choose to maintain a good work/life balance and was very happy with that choice) or are ridiculously brilliant. Along the same lines, the management claims that a well-performing engineer can be just as well compensated regardless of whether s/he pursues a path in management or remains a talented software engineer. However, based on my experiences, I don't believe this is 100% true. Not that differing compensation is unreasonable; I just wish that management would not make this claim (unless I'm mistaken).