Pros
Flexibile hours, in-house chefs and drinks, not bad comp, very pet friendly as long as you take pick up after them, other allowances to help you skill up, hybrid work environment
Cons
The development ecosystem is very rigid down to code reviews. There is no freedom to be creative with coding or design. I found the “consistency” argument thrown at me several times. Even while using a particular API I was told to use APIs that were used more frequently in other parts of the code so I had to search other parts of the code to see how many times an API was used and then compare it with the more creative solution I had in mind. If mine was better in any objective way, I found that it was quickly shutdown with no explanation. Design docs require months of comments, discussions and approvals to just get a simple CRUD service up and running. All of these are enforced at a granular level with a “my way or the highway” mentality even for senior engineers. There is no polyglot freedom or areas where I could work on more frameworky or open source level efforts. It feels like this is another Google minus the Tier 1 brand name, the high bar of talent, the open source projects and the deep engineering work that often gets done at a system level. For plain vanilla CRUD services this level of oversight and micromanagement is just nuts and doesn’t bring the company much value in my opinion. It doesn’t allow engineers to grow and comes across as extremely condescending and dismissive of previous experiences. It’s a bizarrely run company with massively inefficient processes for already established and battle tested processes at other banner tech companies.