Pros
I think the humans are fantastic, one on one. You can have a fantastic lunch and personal relationship with anyone there. They hire genuinely kind people who wish to see you succeed in your career. They avoid, or try to resolve, drama and for the most part my 4.5 years there have been super chill, no drama and a great place to make good lasting friendships. HR really wants to have a good culture and sometimes maybe come off as trying too hard to fix something that isn't broken. The culture, the social aspect of the job particularly, is the best part of the job.
Cons
There isn't a good work load distribution, there are people who work much harder and much longer hours than the less motivated individuals such as myself. That can't possibly be healthy. If you look up the pareto distribution I believe the workload naturally follows this pattern and I think having smaller teams help redistribute the load but also puts a ton of pressure on one or two individuals. I felt particularly guilty letting my small team down when things got very hard for me and my family during the pandemic. I lost my mother as we welcomed our son into our growing family and my wife became very ill. The team and management swarmed around me to help which was literally life saving. However, the pressure I felt to establish and maintain new expectations as I balanced life at home and work was too much for me and I broke. Several black swan events contributed to me breaking mentally. The silver lining was how amazing it was to see how the team and managers worked together to help me and others make it though a rough year. I also saw employees donate their PTO to others in need. It was great to see the individuals step up in those times of need, I just wish there were less of those times of need. Had we had more than one week of paid paternity leave I believe we would have been much better off. I didn't plan financially to take the 3 months off because my wife and I didn't think we would need it. But I was wrong, covid hit. My wife had a very rough pregnancy, and weeks after my son was born my mother unexpectedly died from complications that would have been resolved in a normal year. There was no way I could carry my weight at work. They lightened my load, gave me time to recover, but l still couldn't alleviate my guilt and my fear of loosing my job because I couldn't pull myself up by my bootstraps. My wife's post partum was very hard on her. At one point her doctor thought she was showing signs for multiple sclerosis. I was finally given notice at work that I needed to up my contributions and I believe that became too much for me as I pulled out all the stops and focused only on work so I didn't loose my job and my health insurance. I was torn in two as my wife struggled to manage things at home as I desperately tried to focus my mental faculties enough to produce and avoid being written up. I wanted to just be allowed to not think or worry about work so I could focus on my families health, but that just wasn't in the cards as far as I could see, and I was not seeing clearly. To be fair, this is the system we all have to work with, and I now see why people say you should save up for these black swan events even before you pay down student loans or invest in a house. I should have listened to Dave Ramsey, I get it. But I didn't think things could get thaaaat bad. So I adjusted my risk management according to my overly optimistic world view. So I don't know how to rank this company when it makes up just a small part of the cooperate and social model that needs fundamental repairs. The pareto distribution of wealth has gone wild and it is becoming harder and harder for more and more people to fulfil their basic needs. I'm in an above average paying career! I can't imagine the year the rest of the world must have had and it broke me when as I woke up to see how bad things have gotten. My two grandpas fought in WWII for their baby boomer children who then went on to fight in other wars. My fathers father watched his best friend give his life in WWII. They all fought for a better world than this. I am one of millions in this country who fall into the unemployment gap because we can't check the right boxes as to why we are shattered. I will survive without unemployment, it'll just set me back on paying down studdent debts, but to the rest of those who really need it, I hope they can find what they need and I am changing my career path to see what I can do to help fix this broken system. I can't write another line of code until we fix the real pipeline issue, I learned that from working here. Pull the red lever, stop the train, get the thing back on track. I understand we can't all do that, and I am in a privileged position to now work towards that end, and maybe all I can do is come on sites like these and write out my two cents, but it sure makes more sense to me to do that than try and write average code. I will miss working with the people though. I should stop rambling, but I just want to say this. In my heart I want to leave this company all 5 star reviews, the people are great, but they have adopted so many industry standards rather than lead the industry. I think they could do more.