Pros
There are a lot of smart, hard working, funny, cool people who work here. Because it's a small company (~80 people) there are a lot of opportunities to lead and contribute to decisions and have access to senior leaders, including an open door policy from the CEO. The company is also transitioning from Waterfall to Agile, which is good in the long-term. Short term, it's causing some headaches. Professionally I learned a lot and grew a lot. My team onboarded people with a lot of training. I got meaningful work to do right away, and almost never felt like I was doing busywork or s*** work (I have heard differently from people on other teams - that they got zero training, and stuck on busywork tickets for the first 6 months). Ask about this in the interview, I guess. Good on work life balance. Most weeks for me were 40 hour weeks and no one ever minded.
Cons
Informal leadership opportunities/learning opportunities are frequent, actual promotions are rare. It feels like there is a "secret" org chart - several people are related to the CEO, and there are cliques of people who used to work together at previous companies. There are a lot of new employees this year (some due to growth, others turnover) which can be tricky culturally. Teams are currently re-forming and determining their identities and norms. The Agile Transformation is in its "storming" stage where there is a lot of discontent, and morale is low on some teams - hopefully this improves, but I'm worried. Even though this is a small software company, the space they're in is heavily regulated by the FDA. As a result, the SDLC processes are very formal and even rigid. I think people aren't prepared enough/educated enough about this in the interview process - about how this regulation makes software development different from other small companies. That can lead to false expectations of new employees.