Pros
Work with an awesome team – The people I worked with at Bigcommerce were smart, dedicated, supportive, honest people. They were experts in their fields and during the 3.5 years I was there taught me so much about being an engineer, working in a distributed team. Many of the people I worked with have become lifelong friends. Become an expert – You'll be given an opportunity to become an expert in whatever area you work. You'll be held to a high standard, expected to know a lot and learn quickly, but will be rewarded with interesting problems and, if you're anything like me, will be challenged and forced to grow as an engineer. Work on interesting problems – Bigcommerce still has a large legacy codebase. You'll learn about refactoring a legacy codebase into smaller services (a skill that I expect will be useful wherever I go). You'll learn about how to make changes in an ecosystem with 100,000 merchants who rely on the existing behaviour. You'll encounter the most bizarre edge cases that only come from having a system used by millions of users. It's a great combination of challenge, excitement and, sometimes, LOLs. Get promoted because you deserve it – I've never noticed any nepotism at Bigcommerce. In the engineering team, people have been universally promoted because of their ability to do the new job and as a recognition of the work they've already been doing. The management team are not stingy with pay rises (when warranted) and promotions and are genuinely dedicated to helping each team member achieve what he or she wants.
Cons
I left the company not because it was no longer a great place to work, but because I wanted to try my hand at more things without as much of a safety net. Bigcommerce is a large company (I believe the engineering team is in excess of 100) and so affords more interesting problems to work on, more smart people from whom to learn but this comes with less opportunity to make mistakes, to try your hand at something entirely new (for example, they would be foolish to allow me to run their production database infrastructure, but I'd still love to have a crack) and to make decisions. Having said this, I happily recommend this as a great place to work. It will move your career forward in leaps and bounds and you'll have a blast while it's happening.
