Pros
- offices are well-designed and comfortable - benefits are quite good, including vacation and parental leave - nice product that people outside the company know and respect - other perks, like lunch in the US office, are very welcome - compensation is comparable to other mid-tier tech or media companies, although it falls well short of the top tier
Cons
- This is probably one of the worst-managed companies in the world, making the experience of working here miserable unless you somehow land on the right team - bizarre organization design (missions? Tribes?) that seems like it was deliberately intended to create a host of dysfunctional fiefdoms, silos, and sleepy backwaters - deeply insecure and insular culture that can be hostile to new ideas, outside influence, and critical thinking- it might look like a fun Californian tech company on the surface but it is anything but open and transparent underneath it - cross team communication and collaboration is spectacularly broken: it’s gotten to be almost impossible to get anything done unless you can do it by yourself - the tech stack is badly fragmented and riddled with system-level architecture debt, making things like decent data infrastructure and common developer tooling impossible - senior management is left over from the startup phase and hasn’t yet been replaced by a professional management team - and other than the excellent ex-Netflix CFO, boy does it show - no one is actually accountable for anything because virtually all decisions must take place though a bewildering process of group consensus, where people who are ignorant of the topic at hand somehow have just as much of a say as the experts - middle managers, including engineering managers, are, by and large, very junior, tend to lack any qualifications for their positions (favoritism again), and might put in 25 hours a week on average, including fikas and 1:1s with direct reports to talk about their feelings - functions like HR and administration can be disturbingly unprofessional and more than a bit lax about following things like, well, local laws - the company does a poor job of investing in its staff - for example, there are few training or development opportunities. You’re expected to ”wing it” in any job without any instruction or the expectation of having any professional skills - an alarmingly large percentage of employees seem to be either openly disrespectful of one another or permanently angry, or both
