I'll mention here that while the Pros were mostly reflections of my own personal experience and don't always match up with everyone else's experiences, the following Cons were felt by pretty much everyone I've talked to at PB.
-By far, the biggest issue when I left was that it felt like we'd completely lost sense of our goals as a company, and management had moved into a somewhat desperate "throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks" mode. In the months leading up to my leaving, we pivoted on our objectives so many times that it felt like nothing ever got finished, ideas would get dropped, and peoples' hard work got wasted--morale took a huge blow as a result, and this burned out and lost PB a lot of good people (including me). The common feeling among many of my colleagues is that leadership is out of their depth on our current projects, and I think the results of that have started to become clear.
-Aside from the big elephant in the room above, my personal biggest gripe is the lack of opportunities for advancement. PB has had almost freakishly high employee retention over the years, which is cool, but I think the downside to that is that when no one leaves, no one is moving out of their positions, and the entire hierarchy gets frozen in place. I fought tooth and nail for promotions--for myself and for my employees--and got shut down at pretty much every turn by a whole lot of red tape. This is all the more frustrating when it feels like some people (particularly in upper leadership) were able to give themselves vague, custom job titles.
-The salaries have been pretty dismal and under industry standard (and for Bay Area cost of living) for most of the time I was there. They did try to do a bit of readjusting (I think maybe due to California laws), and I personally got a pretty decent pay bump in my last year working there, but many of my colleagues were barely getting by, and some were even having to work multiple jobs.
-At least on my project, communication was abysmal between teams. We grew really fast without having a super clear structure, and the result is that no one ever seems to know who owns or should insight on particular issues. My team frequently got left out of conversations that had huge impacts on us, and we would only find out when changes were made, and then we had to scramble to address the problems it caused us. In fairness, a lot of newer hires later told me that when they were brought on, they had absolutely no introduction to the other teams or who owns particular parts of the process, but that in itself is an issue. We even had problems centralizing our teams over slack; people weren't added to the right channels, duplicate channels and channels with unclear purposes were made, and so much backchanneling happened in DMs.
