Pros
Good culture Fun work environment Engineers have a lot of freedom No deadlines (!) Very passionate product team Very capable engineers Very little process and limited meetings especially for engineers. Good speed of execution- Code is deployed 3 times a day for main monolith and can be deployed unlimited times on demand for backend services. Apps are released every 2 months. Great location- huge building and right in downtown Great stock refresh plan Very open culture when it comes to execs talking about roadmaps, and honest company performance. Very collaborative environment - you can ping any engineer on any team on irc in team chat rooms. There are on point members for every team who will respond to any questions. Even debugging code (wow) Free lunch on fridays, free birthday cake from team on birthdays. $$ to spend on ‘productivity items’ like your favorite keyboard, book, noise cancelling headphones. Recently efforts being made to show gratitude and make employees feel valuable (its working) like yelpiversary cards (work anniversary) Quarterly ‘reviews’ which aren’t really performance reviews- they are conversations with your manager to set expectations and give feedback. Free ASL classes, free movie nights every fortnight. I worked for a big company before this and though that company has a big name- I didn’t enjoy the culture, work at all. I’m blown away by this company.
Cons
Might not find challenging projects depending on team. Outsiders have a perception that yelp is not doing anything new/innovative. Quarterly review system is great but engineers don’t know what to look forward to or build their career. Need to be pro active about your career growth at the company.