Pros
To be honest, I did not have high expectations when I applied; mostly because of a poor experience interning with Cisco some years ago. However, after going through the interview process of coming to the office and meeting my future team, I was convinced to join even though I had other offers from places I had ranked higher at the beginning of my job search (including a fast growing profitable biotech startup that was offering 10% profit share). I was searching for culture and work life as the utmost important items for my job search this time around, and believe I chose correctly. Here are some reasons why: - No workaholic culture here; I'm in the office working 8 hours a day and that's normal. There are those that work more, but that's self-driven. Many in leadership are now old enough to have kids, and the expectation from above is this isn't a place where your life is expected to be devoted to work. - That being said people are not apathetic or lazy. In fact the people I work with hold themselves to a very high standard, even though we already are many levels of quality above what competitors in the same space try to imitate. - The people I work with day to day are very smart; previously working for places such as Apple, Facebook, Nest, etc. - This might seem trivial, but the interior decorating at the office is the best I've ever worked at, and I would not have previously held that in high regard as something to care about but it makes coming into work feel just a little nicer every day. - Culture-wise, openness and transparency are valued not just in a mission statement but in actual practice. - It's not perfect, but management genuinely cares about making Meraki a welcoming place to work for ALL. Like almost all tech companies, the demographics are skewed in the engineering department, but efforts are underway to be more diverse. - Opportunity to work on everything ranging from firmware to React - Business performance is excellent, growing extremely quickly - Pay matches other top companies in the area
Cons
- The aforementioned diversity issue; though unfortunately not any worse than any other place I've worked. And as I stated earlier, it's an actual priority of management. - Some process aspects are not perfect, something typical of a formally smaller company transitioning into another tier. * Career ladder is not well defined though new guidelines have been released recently for some roles * I was asked a few algorithmic coding questions when I interviewed which I personally think are poor for determining candidate quality. But there are no formal reviews around interview questions like tracking how they correlate to job performance later, or if they favor certain types of candidates, etc. which I think would be useful. I was asked one very open ended collaborative project type question in my last on site interview though, so there are individual interviewers that go above and beyond. - Management can sometimes seem like they're figuring it out as they go along, which they are. A Google study found that the least important quality in a manager is technical expertise; great news for the mostly MIT PhD upper management! Jokes aside, even though many managers have fallen upward by nature of being there earlier as more people were hired (very standard), none are complacent or stuck in their ways. Every manager I've seen is held accountable by both themselves and others and is always trying to improve, which is better than 95% of other places.
