Pros
- Many genuine and friendly people (excluding some managers and directors) - Fun vibes (at least my team was) - Working with very big traffic/data pays off in terms of experience on the long run - Few managers/directors are competent, majority are not - Yearly salary increases (if you are already paid fairly, then this is good) - Near-decent bonuses - Average breakfast - Annual Christmas party (nice gifts if your name is drawn)
Cons
- Most of the Engineering directors/managers have no clue how to run their teams. They favour committing to unclear product requirements and delivering buggy software over following best practises of SDLC. (companies hire senior developers for a reason, listen to them every now and then) - Due to lack of clear requirements on many projects, engineers end up working a lot of extra hours (this is not common to all teams of course, but the mindset exists across enough teams) - There is a clear lack of technical vision in many engineering teams (some directors never made one in their lives) - Some engineering directors prefer keeping their employees on old tech stack out of fear that they would leave and join other companies with better pay (a director openly shared this with his team on more than one occasion) - Junior developers will always find it fun since they have no experience working in other companies, most seniors I met did not enjoy working there (mostly because they found their manager/director to be incompetent) - There is no defined criteria for promotion, there is no documentation that explains how someone could move from an intermediate to a senior, a lead to a manager, etc. (I worked there for many years, I was never provided any template for that, assuming it existed). - Company has a very good subscriber model for paid content, and a lot of marketing was done to bring more traffic to their tube sites. Money is there for the company to keep growing, but don't think for one second that they care as much for engineering growth (at least not like they claim on their website). - Many engineers have come forward with brilliant ideas and initiatives to drive the engineering vision to better standing, only obstacle to that was incompetent directors that only cared about keeping their pay and not taking any bold risks (they claim they want to reach Google-level one day, then start taking some bold moves if that's the case)