So sad to leave this company, it's really great!
Pros
Recently left upon relocating for family commitments, literally cried the first day I didn't go in to work. (I am not some freaky person who is always like, crying, or who doesn't have any purpose in life outside of their job or whatnot.) Terrific culture and great co-workers who are--from my own perspective--superior as human beings to almost all people I have worked with anywhere else, in addition to being good at their jobs. How is this possible? Part is that we passed on a lot of smart candidates who are not also cooperative and open, and also, in the other direction, such candidates might prefer a different company themselves. Also, young folk who might otherwise develop into punks or turtles in some other environment can look to the senior engineers for a pretty solid example how to be a good teammate. To be somewhat more concrete, assume that I am not a pain in the a. who hates all people. Then you might share my belief that at most places you work, there will be like 50% of people you are totally cool with at work but you wouldn't normally be friends with otherwise, like you wouldn't have uproarious fun together going out, but as civilized people you can totally work together without problems. There might be like 20% of people who you don't really like but it's no big deal because you don't have to interact much, and 20% of people who you are sort of friends with but they are not like your best friends. Finally, there will be 5% of people who are causing you regular stress and discord, balanced by 5% close friends you can commiserate with. At BrightRoll, assuming that my feelings are reciprocated, I would say it is more like 40% really close friends, 40% reasonable friends, and 20% not so close but totally get along fine (and no antagonists, whether direct or buffered).
Cons
Because of some contingencies about my specific team and role, and some transitions that occurred when our CTO left, I wasn't really able to use my full technical expertise to help the company, and was in many ways blocked from taking on greater technical responsibilities in general. But, as you get older you may become comfortable with not becoming an important person in terms of your career or title (or even, real technical impact) as long as you consider yourself to be doing important work in other ways...in my case I was enabled to focus on personal and professional relationships with my co-workers. If, however, you are still an ambitious career person and want to find your destiny at BrightRoll, it is in fact pretty unlikely that you would find yourself in a similar situation to my own, as we reorganized the teams just after I left, and I was in a pretty anomalous position to begin with. If you factor in the potential pain of believing that you have some transformative expertise that only like a thousand people in the world have at your level (and you are not some poorly-socialzed academic who is always inventing complicated math models but has no grasp of practical business or how to work with product people or lead a team or talk or run a meeting), and you watch as your peers in this cohort become rich or famous doing revolutionary stuff at other companies, and you still can feel self-actualized and happy every day, then that is in large part a measure of how great people are at this company!