Vantaggi
The benefits are great: free food, and drinks, with free lunch 3 days a week, in addition to door dash credits—gym and arcade on site. Teams differ, but my team was a fairly laid-back environment. Most people are quite nice, and willing to help.
Svantaggi
After 3+ rounds of layoffs, It's clear that this is a ship that's slowly sinking. It seems like management wants to pivot to gimmicky AI tools. Engineers are forced to troubleshoot customer sites one day a week, wasting tons of time. Very little oversight for engineers, no documentation, no code reviews, no QA, no Agile, etc. Very "startup-esque" engineering culture, except in a 10-year-old company, with fairly old and rickety tech. My previous PM would all but ignore me, often not responding to messages in Slack for days, leaving me with very little to do and having to scrounge around with other teams for small tasks to work on. Overall very little direction, leaving me constantly worried if what I was working on was actually important. Promised that big projects were always "a month out". Definite questions about career progression, and no clear path forward for engineers, especially young/new grad engineers. We had our first-ever (?) set of performance reviews a few months back, but layoffs right after many engineers who got top marks in their reviews (and were hinted at raises) were laid off. Mediocre compensation, not amazing, but not terrible either. It's a bit low in high-cost-of-living areas. Decent amount of stock options, but with no IPO on the horizon(And without a CFO), they're functionally worthless.