Vantaggi
I'm definitely getting the sense that hybris is a culture of wanting to kick butt. And there isn't a bunch of pointless stuff getting in the way of that objective. While there's plenty of debate as to how to achieve our goals, it's always respectful and generally productive here from what I've seen. There is truth to the silo phenomenon others have observed. The other side of that coin is that teams have a lot of discretion in terms of how to achieve their goals. That includes a fair amount of discretion in terms of project management and technology choices for new projects. This is not always convenient for those of us who tend to pinch hit on a lot of different projects but not a downer for me as I dig the opportunities to learn new stuff and would rather not be doing the same things every day. But I have observed to many cooks in a kitchen on one project. Some of this is due to a recent rejiggering of departments and groups I suspect. Goals seem clearly communicated and we have ambitions in areas that seem like the right directions to be moving to me. I have been here a couple months now and have yet to see politics get in the way of identifying or solving an obvious problem. The Chicago office is gorgeous and our expansion plans might very well be cooler than anything they've done in the bay area. We're treated like adults. There's beer in the fridge and even a keg in the cooler and no one thinks twice about grabbing a beer towards the end of the day or during general tech presentations held every Friday. People regularly work from or start the day at home, sometimes multiple days a week as many of us have to attend meetings early in the morning with Europe and nobody would think twice about asking to work from home for family/personal reasons. There's also plenty of fresh fruit and drinks to be had and free lunch on Fridays. There's plenty of travel for a lot of roles but travel to places like Munich, Montreal, Boulder, Poland, etc... The biggest seller for me so far is that people are by and large, nice, approachable, not afraid, smart, etc... All signs of people who are accustomed to having successes and higher than typical expectations in a work place.
Svantaggi
It's a quibble but I really hate branding that makes a proper nouns lower-case. Typing "hybris" repeatedly bugs the hell out of me and makes me feel wrong. Health insurance in Chicago is a choice between a great-on-paper more or less free ride on the deductible plan with one of the worst-ranked providers in Illinois (Aetna) or 200 a month towards an Obama-care plan of your choice. That was kind of a bummer with an extra dash of irony given that our HQ is in Germany, whose health care system is probably among the finest and most freely accessible to its citizens in the world. With the bonus, my salary will be competitive. That's not what bonuses are for. If I didn't value culture as much as I did, I could do a lot better. The vast majority of the existing code base is Java. Cleaner than usual from the looks of it (I've had a lot of negative Java experiences) but still with plenty of build problems. None of that bothered me enough to knock it down a star but one potential dark cloud on the horizon that might is our recent acquisition by SAP, a company very much in the vein of massively too huge to fail IBM-ish type companies that wanted us for our ability to deliver competent user experiences, which is something such companies tend to struggle with because their own gargantuan soul-crushing, excessively procedure-oriented cultures send people with any hing of an imagination running for cover. hybris management has promised to keep us well-insulated from SAP politics and procedures and there is supposedly buy-in from SAP on this insulation as well but integrating with their IT is already proving to be a bit restrictive and painful and I've worked for monolithic companies like this before. I think it's in their nature to carpet bomb everything with procedure until everything is uniform and completely devoid of .anything resembling a productive or imaginative work environment.