Pros
Quality leadership. Management means well and has experience. I can't think of a single person who fits the stereotypical 'manglement'. I have been burned by bad management before, but not here. The bottom line is that I've been treated very well and that counts for a lot. Solid compensation. It is generally agreed that we pay slightly above market value to acquire talent. And of course that comes with the silicon valley perks. twice weekly meals, medical dental vision, 401k, commuter benefits, and a Netflix-style discretionary time off policy. Transparency. When management decides that a problem needs to be fixed, they try their best to keep everyone in the loop. We are currently spread out over 3 different offices within a few blocks of each other. Our CEO and upper management made sure we knew that they were attempting to solve this (not easy in our area) and eventually were able to solve it. Great people. People who work here are smart, hard working, have a great attitude, and I often see incidents of putting in more time & effort than may have been necessary to make things better. A healthy attitude towards self-improvement. As an organization, I see a consistent effort to tighten standards, identify problems, and try & eventually embrace new technologies. As long as we move faster than the forces of entropy, I have confidence things will get better as time goes on. Retention of talent. I have seen almost no one leave, and each of those was for excellent reasons. This is silicon valley. People here are talented and work hard, they could easily find jobs at another company. They don't. And that really says something.
Cons
Communication between departments has historically been less than ideal. This has recently come to light, see transparency above, and it's something to keep an eye on. Unfortunately it really seems that, as a culture, groups are fairly isolated from one another. For example, it was after I had been with the company for months that someone bothered to put together and present a big picture view on how data actually moved through our organisation, a crucial insight for our task. Or, one of our teams had absolutely no visibility into our workflow, resulting in duplicate work. Work life balance can be low, varying greatly upon team. Some people I know have terrible balance, but that I blame mostly on deployment practices & technical debt, both of which are issues that are being actively addressed. Very (overly) ambitious. We only have ~20 engineers yet are trying to maintain & improve two distinct products, work on at least two of the hardest problems in the industry (not related to the above two), burn down technical debt, develop our own internal infrastructure tooling, and plan for potential new projects.