Pros
Centro has three main pros. First, our CEO knows what he's doing. Second, the benefits are mostly pretty great--free yoga three times a week, a bike room, the 401k match is beyond generous, etc. Finally, there are talented engineers on the team, though most people we have hired in the last six months or so have been very junior.
Cons
Centro's promises were a lie. When I was hired, they promised flexibility, a positive work environment where learning from mistakes and growing were paramount, kick-ass benefits, and the opportunity to work on a possibly market changing product. By this past August, over two thirds of the engineers had quit. Earlier last year, new management was brought into the engineering department. They decided to stop all work on our main project and scrap what we had. This is the second time in as many years that all development work on this project has been halted, the app completely re-architected, and engineering yelled at because we didn't control scope creep (which is a product issue--our product team has been completely replaced three times in the last couple years). This new management were mostly consultants brought in to get a product out the doors. Suddenly, we had after work meetings lasting until 9pm. The entire engineering team was yelled at multiple times for questioning why development work was being completely scraped when a good portion of the code was really good, worked, and could be reused in a new product. We were often left in the dark about high level management decisions, only to be suddenly surprised that we were doing things not to management's liking. It was very confusing to be told one month that hey, we're doing things this one way, and then the next be screamed at in a meeting because we were doing things in the agreed upon way. One of Centro's big selling points are its awesome benefits: 15 days PTO when you start, plus 10 "Ferris Bueller" anytime days. The purpose of these days was to use them as freebie days, for any reason, as long as your responsibilities were covered. We were told that we weren't allowed to use Ferris Bueller days as intended, and anyone who used one needed "a good reason". Engineering management told us that Centro's work from home policies were too lose--we have many remote workers and several people live over two hours form the office (one direction) and specifically picked Centro because of the great remote working policy. From that point onward, working from home got people targeted for "having a bad attitude”, despite their actual attitude. The product Centro is building is unrealistic; it aims to be the be-all end-all of placing ads online. Larger companies have built similar products that target specific types of ads (e.g., video ads, text ads for certain platforms). This is supposed to support everything. Just hitting the main APIs for ad placement is a gigantic project, and engineering has had to rebuild this APIs multiple times since management keeps scrapping what we have. If you're an engineer and you're looking to work at Centro, work elsewhere. The benefits are great (PTO is generous, health insurance is awesome, snacks are provide in excess), but the drama, politics and nepotism will make you hate your job, as it did for me and over 15 other engineers. Centro isn't worth it.