Pros
* Remote-first. For this, I'm giving more than 1 star. Hopper was one of the better employers I've worked with that committed to fully remote. As a result, my teammates are very smart people because of the larger talent pool, and not having to commute is a big plus. * Macbook Pro. Coding on anything else sucks. * Google Enterprise. Google Meet, Google Cloud Platform, Google Calendar, Google Slides. It's all quite nice and high quality relative to Microsoft environments. * $200/year annual travel perk. * Some middle management is reasonable, and some teams are well insulated from chaos elsewhere in the company. Middle management with more tenure is a good indicator of managers who can push back against upper management's often unreasonable demands. * Honestly good healthcare benefits. BCBS was solid. Mat and Pat leave was good. Lack of 401k match, gym benefits for US employees, or higher base salary is a big miss among an otherwise competitive package.
Cons
1. Management is rampant with toxic bullies and only cares about short-term revenue gains. Seriously, just have a friend whose opinion you trust use the app to research and book some form of travel before you join. Upper management can and will abruptly change your team's priorities if a cow farts in Kansas. 2. Lots of sycophants. Look that up if you don't know what it is. 3. Bloated tech and legacy code, due to prioritizing immediately needed quick hits over sensible long-term roadmaps with ample time for good engineering and code review. Why does this happen? See Point 1. 4. Stole Amazon's culture and leadership principles, but only selectively employs them when its convenient. Claims "leaders are right, a lot", but when leaders are wrong, they just fire all the underlings. Only ICs are expected to truly admit "ownership" over their mistakes. 5. Seeing good teammates get fired, often, for no compelling reason, with no warning to other teammates who might rely on them. 6. Remote work-life balance isn't well-enforced. On-call is frustrating. Unlimited PTO is just a way to not have to pay you out for what would usually be accrued time off. 7. Long tenure employees aren't necessarily the most reasonable bunch. Think about Points 1-5. If you experience all that, and stick it out, what kind of person does that then select for? Flip side of this is favoritism can work in your favor if someone with tenure likes you, and that then shields some of the BS from up top. 8. Pressure to sometimes do wrong by the customer to make more money. Have a moral compass. 9. Product (Management) is king. Devs have often made product suggestions, based on their own experience and user feedback in company Slack channels. We often don't get taken seriously, even though we work and use the product all the time. C-suite or other upper management (See Point 2) usually jumps in and bullies those who speak up. Customer Support Agents have to clean up the mess of a convoluted ever-changing user experience. C-suite will never admit to being wrong. Data is used to support their pre-existing narrative and world view, but not to call it into question. 10. Graphic Design is used to cover up the above. The bunnies are cute and friendly. Hopper's culture and product is not. 11. Lack of diversity. Customer Support Agents are the most diverse part of the company. This leads to lack of intellectual diversity, creating echo chambers that result in the issues above.