Vantaggi
I was the second non-founding employee at Glassdoor, so I've been here since the beginning. Clearly it's working for me. The management is some of the best I've worked with, and I've worked in tech for quite a long time. They're not just great at what they do, either. They're genuinely fun people. I consider myself a code artist. (I'm not nearly as douchey as that sounds.) I find that Glassdoor continues to maintain my interest with the challenges of developing the site. I'm continuously learning new things, which makes me very happy. The office environment is for the most part an open floor plan. No soul-deadening cubicles, just a bunch of desks. As a web developer, I'm face-to-face with our designer, which works very well. People can simply turn around and ask questions of other team members. It's a very interactive environment, and I like that. The folks who have chattier jobs, like Business Development, our lawyer, and the head of marketing all have private offices, which also works well. We don't have to listen to them talking on the phone all day. The office kitchen is heavily stocked with an assortment of soft drinks, unhealthy snacks, and fresh fruit. There is also beer and wine on Friday afternoons and with the occasional barbecue on our expansive deck. Employees take turns playing disk jockey on the office stereo. The office has an entire wall of windows looking out onto the Sausalito hills. And the water is only a block away. Overall, the office lifestyle is pretty darned good.
Svantaggi
The downside of constantly being challenged is that I'm usually exhausted at the end of the day. If I have a social event right after work, it takes me about an hour to recover from my 'code coma' and be able to make decent conversation. Our site needs to work on Internet Explorer. Any web developer will read that and start shaking their heads in sympathy. Everyone else should just stop using IE and switch to Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. Please? You'll be glad you did. The pay is on the low side, but there are the stock options, which hopefully will hugely make amends for that some day. Still, it would be nice to make a little more money. Every engineer knows that nice vacations and the latest electronic gadgets are a great cure for burn-out. :-) Though the company is fairly relaxed about vacation time, the 'official' 2 weeks seems pretty minimal. (Full disclosure: I believe we should get 4-6 weeks vacation, like the more-civilized Europeans. But I'm not sure that would work in a start-up environment.)