Pros
* Meaningful work * Good bennefits * Colleagues generally friendly
Cons
It's hard to appraise the organization as a whole due to how severely fragmented the technology/development teams is. In my time there I never spoke to anyone outside the handful of people on my team or direct supervisor, and got no feel for the broader organization as a result, and as a natural side-effect was also completely insulated from any of the positive feelings that could stem from the downstream impact of my work or the work MSK is doing more broadly. Speaking only to my own experience, I would not recommend MSK to any developer. There are other teams at MSK which I'm sure are great to work at and doing stellar and important work, and I don't want this review to turn off all potential applicants since that work is so important. Only advice I can give is to go with your gut in the interview process, and try not to be blinded by the prestige of the name. Cons with my experience: * Mediocre compensation for the level of work / time demanded, especially in this job market. * The management made no effort to make new hires feel like part of the team or organization, with not even a token optional in-person event to build any kind of relationship with coworkers while I was there. * Programmers were made to work across many disparate tracks losing an enormous amount of time and energy to switching between tracks. * No strong culture observed of documentation or testing leading to confusion when working on a new track and general code brittleness. * No overarching tech department ethos behind style or coding conventions, with much inherited code being of mediocre quality and terrible styling, though functional. * An absurd amount of time in meetings, I'd conservatively give 3/4 hours a day as the average leaving little time/energy for development work. * While developers in the company were always at least decent, much of the outside contractors produced work is just awful from any perspective: performance, readability, maintainability, adherence to goals, documentation. Whatever the process is for selecting contactors and checking in on their progress needs to be entirely reworked from the ground up.
