Pros
A lot of places brag about engineering competency, but Invoca deftly earns its reputation. Three of the most brilliant people I've ever had the honor to work with head the engineering department, and the fourth, our staff scientist, takes the absolute cake in terms of brain power. Usually such individuals are black boxes of information, quickly coming up with solutions and working to get things done letting few others in on their secrets. However, these 4 individuals always take the time to teach and share, and most importantly, discuss solutions with everyone involved. It's hard to not push yourself to the best of your abilities when surrounded by these people. This place is the best possible place to begin your career in terms of growth and development skills, or even pick up in the middle of it if you do not feel positively challenged at your current dev position. The dev team itself has grown over time, in both size and maturity. The executive team here is very open to suggestions and very aware of their employees feelings. This is a stark change from just a year ago, which shows how we learn and grow. The company culture has been strained over time, but recently it's picked up. We frequently hang out after hours, playing softball, basketball, or volleyball or just simply spending time in the Funk Zone. At work, we tend to have just as much fun (so long as a major conference or product release isn't looming overhead: see cons) on the job as off, which is sometimes a much needed relief.
Cons
I can't stress this enough, these are minor complaints, and only things that could use some improvement and have been improving over the years as we scale as a company. This is a product of the size of the company, and how quickly it likes to get things done, but you will feel the stress of major events or product releases. This has improved over the years (when I started, the office was frequently full at 8pm, life is much different these days), and mostly stems from an unfocused goal at the beginning of said product launch/conference/etc that eventually rights itself into a specific attainable goal after cutting much of the stuff that is not necessary (if only we could start projects that way!) As a company grows, employees should see more benefits, not less, and this hurts company morale. Gym Membership is almost a guarantee in Santa Barbara, and the fact that we no longer offer one (we do have a 40 dollar stipend instead) is hugely disappointing. Although I am personally not a fan of offsite work, it is important to the industry and we need to train our offsite employees better at communication so that this more common work style is more acceptable and provide all necessary resources to those employees. Company hires tend to be on the younger side, which is both good and bad (since I started as a youngling). Sometimes this can make some of your coworkers feel less professional because of maturity levels, but this is a pretty minimal complaint, as there are plenty of well grounded employees in younger age ranges as well and usually someone speaks up. Some teams have segmented themselves, in some cases by letting a physical location deter them. It'd be great to get interdepartmental communication back up. These teams tend to complain the most about the lack of inclusion in events (even though they have the same access) but constantly hold team specific events without including everyone else.