Pros
good pay: regular comp adjustments & bonuses, competitive for the area. work life balance is great*: most teams prefer weekly meetings instead of daily, nobody pays attention to the hours u work as long as ur showing up to important meetings & getting work done. no micromanagement. depends on ur manager * unless u need to work with someone in an inconvenient timezone good time off: easy to schedule paid time off. in the US it's considered "unlimited" but the unspoken rule is that you shouldn't take more than 20 days a year. depends on ur manager. its also easy to schedule unpaid time off if you need a longer vacation (3 - 6 months, etc) lots of different types of work: hardware engineering, super low level platform stuff, high level platform agnostic stuff, web stuff, dev ops stuff, etc. flexibility: given ~2 years of experience & good standing with ur manager, its generally possible to pick up work in a different team if you'd like to work in a different area. however this depends on ur manager & availability within other teams. security: ive never seen someone get laid off. if you're consistently productive to the standards of ur manager there is basically no risk of layoff. remote: offers 100% virtual employment but upper management has been trying for over a year to push people to come back to the office *some* of the days of each week.
Cons
code quality: lots of technical debt everywhere & sparse / often useless documentation. expect to spend a lot of time on maintenance & debugging things documentation quality: really bad. arista encourages an open environment where engineers should ping each other directly if they need help with something. this has its up sides, its nice to be able to talk to someone when you need help, but clear & up to date documentation is neglected because everyone tends to just ping eachother. if you maintain an important piece of code, expect to be answering questions about it whenever someone new is working on it. also can lead to single points of failure when the one engineer that knows how some undocumented thing works is on vacation or has left the company. career outline: arista probably doesn't have a roadmap in mind for your career. expect to have to drive that yourself. If you want growth, you'll need to actively persue it. This may mean picking up tasks that haven't been assigned to you explicitly, or consistently asking ur manager for more code ownership / responsibility. if you aren't proactive, its easy to end up working on small / menial tasks. If you are proactive, you'll likely be fine. undefined roles: theres a culture of "everyone is an engineer" and "everyone does everything" which in practice means that you'll be expected to learn / do whatever needs doing regardless if ur interested or not. this can be a pro or a con depending on how u feel about it. undefined tasks: things are highly manager dependent & theres no unified method of documenting features & tasks. ive heard of people working on things for months and then throwing all the work away because of miscommunication / change of direction. likely manager dependent. working across timezones: there is basically no effort made to minimize the interactions across timezones. if you need to collaborate with someone on the other side of the world expect that you may have to attend regular meetings at 6am or 11pm or some other ridiculous hour. A lot of this could be alleviated with async text communication but arista doesn't prioritize that. you will be expected to be flexible. probably depends on managers implicit seniority: arista claims to have no hierarchy or a flat structure where seniority doesnt matter but this is absolutely not true. Levels and ranks are hidden from you (you may be able to deduce your level based on ur compensation but it will never be confirmed explicitly). at the end of the day managers & directors call the shots & during peer review seniority is often the metric that you will use to rank your coworkers. I knew someone whose manager explicitly asked them to change their peer review rankings to better reflect years of experience at the company. diversity: arista tends to tokenize and pay lip service to diversity and inclusion. rather than hiring outside help and giving proper funding to diversity & inclusion initiatives, they tend to dump the responsibility on busy women / POC engineers without proper resources, then pat themselves on the back. this is clearly seen in the demographic of the employees. its also a common occurrence to hear ur coworkers discussing politics openly. in such a polarized political climate this can create an unfriendly work environment. HR will hear ur complaints & address them case by case, but they are not proactive so the responsibility lands on you to contact HR if you become uncomfortable.
