Pros
-Great work-life balance, very few hard deadlines to meet and not a place that wants you to grind. Most of the time just working a typical 40 hours is enough -Good culture and people, there's some really cool individuals you can meet there, and I made some actual friends -I actually enjoyed working in the office for the above reasons
Cons
-A lot of engineers end up being in silos (so they're the only engineer) for their projects. This ends up being rough for everyone since you end up pretty isolated in terms of work, and there's only person who has any expertise with their project. So if you need to find information, you might end up needing to spend a lot of time asking questions across teams to find the one person that actually has an answer to the questions you have. And if they've left you're gonna have to hope there's thorough documentation somewhere. A lot of projects thus have a low bus factor. -Despite being silo'd on my own project, I found myself juggling other projects and responsibilities at times, which make it hard to focus on one task because of all the context switching. -Tech debt. There's stuff that's been really tightly coupled together that shouldn't be and doesn't follow SOLID principles which makes it really difficult to work with sometimes, most people just end up working around it because there's always a push to put engineers on the never ending flow of new projects. -Attrition and turnover. While some people do stick around, I saw a lot of people leave before/around the 2 year mark, which lead to only a few people with 4+ years of experience sticking around, and ends up contributing to the lower bus factor. -Promotions seem more tenure based than performance based. Overall I wasn't bothered by this, but I know others did care. -I would say that Alarm's good about job security, but there were layoffs during the pandemic.
