Yelp

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.

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.