The best and the worst place to work.
Pros
The location is awesome (right across the street from the Giant's stadium), the view is amazing, the hours are flexible and you can work from home a few days a week. The benefits are good: people with a few years at the company get about 4 weeks/year vacation. Most people in the public know the company and have a good feeling towards it. You hear a lot of stories about people finding their ancestors who are excited about the product. When we were public the stock options were good, too.
Cons
There are a lot of people working here from management on down who just live off of the work of everyone else and don't have the skills that they should have for their position. They don't spend much time with the product and can't make valuable decisions for the product and so they rely off of everyone else's ideas in numerous brainstorming meetings and they are really just dead weight. The product team gets most of the credit for creating anything new, even though they just sit in meetings all day brainstorming and aren't really building the product. HR is unsympathetic. Managers don't really care either. They want you to be happy, but they don't want you to succeed more than themselves. They don't want to hear if things aren't going well and would rather fire you than try to resolve any issues. They really just want to be left alone and take any glory from the work that you do to make themselves look good. If other people start to recognize that you're doing a good job, your manager will usually try to swoop in and take the credit for themselves and any kind of perks that come along with it. People generally look friendly, but everyone is vying for position and stealing one another's work. Your work won't get anywhere unless you're friends with the right people, and you'll have to constantly argue with your coworkers who have poor ideas about how things should get done. If you're late on a deadline, you may get a good PM that will just push out the date. Otherwise the PM will make everything look like it's your fault and they won't take any responsibility for their inadequacies. (Deadlines are usually just made up dates anyway and aren't tied to any solid event). PMs may give you a shout-out in a meeting, but they're the one who will get the attention from senior management for the project. The company outsources a lot of work to overseas contractors who do a poor job and increase the image that engineering is just a cog in the wheel and product really does all the work. Even if engineers are doing fabulous work, they get reprimanded by managers and their peers for something petty (or something that's made up) and don't get the thanks or recognition for the work that they are doing. Compensation is low, about $20-30k under other company salaries.
