Pros
Free lunch everyday that's healthy and tasty. Good snack selection, wine, beer, game room--great overall fringe benefits (but unfortunately in PLACE of traditional benefits instead of complementing them). Pretty good work/life balance, mostly friendly and smart coworkers of all ages. New CEO is less hype, more reality and has a plan to turn the company around. Bumped from 2 to 3 stars overall due to his plans so far, but the jury's still out.
Cons
Company is not growing as fast as its closest competitors and is constantly changing direction trying to figure out how to do so. That wouldn't be a con if we could drop the hype, acknowledge our past mistakes and not over-hype the next direction as the best thing ever--it's simply something else to try. Until we have a proven rocket-ship business plan, employees will not get fired-up for every management whim. BE REALISTIC. Again, new CEO is definitely a big improvement in this area. Despite small size, it is a VERY political environment with a LOT of favoritism for employees who aren't necessarily performing up to their titles but who happened to know management who brought them in beforehand. This leaves limited room for advancement for the true performers as it matters more who you know or what books you've written than your actual abilities and contributions. Strangely, the company isn't as engineering focused as it should be for a tech startup. PMs and middle managers are seen as "above" engineers (even leads) and are invited to leadership offsites and strategy meetings while engineers are left to be code monkeys whose domain knowledge and ideas about the business go unused because they are never consulted. Poor traditional benefits; no 401(k) match. The company wastes a lot of money trying to look the part of a hip startup, but behind the scenes it's a very stratified, political environment with more time-wasters than many fortune 500 companies.
