Vantaggi
All the engineering people were really vibing well together. We were able to get a lot done and work well together. It was lovely until the M2M merger caused a lot of weird pressure from the top down. Love working with those people and hanging out outside of work.
Svantaggi
The culture changed, the flexibility and trust disappeared, and scrutiny intensified with the M2M/Alula merger. The office became a place to do your work quietly and hope to not speak too loudly about misgivings.
Getting anything done outside your team was extremely difficult. Requests for other teams to support initiatives were mostly met with "but this, but that" and then the ask would die. It just ended up with a lot of false starts and wasted time for things that never got released. The bare minimum set of features worked well, but no bells and whistles could be accomplished. It was hard to feel proud of something cool because it would be such a grind to get anything cool done. Internally, everyone had the same title - Software Engineer - because MN has to disclosed salary averages. This was probably to hide weirdness.
It was really miserable to be asked why someone would leave at 4:30 instead of 5 all the time. Texts from management would go out after hours, pay seemed low for the commitment that changed - an entirely remote role being required to be in office, and a now dead office culture due to 4 firings of key engineers in the last year. No one wants to speak up.