BabyCenter – “A great place for someone interested in work life balance.”

Pros

BabyCenter really focuses on achieving a good work life balance. Since the company is so family focused no one bats an eye if you need to take a day off to stay home with a sick kid, or yourself. I rarely work late or on weekends which is not the norm for a software engineer. They implemented an agile process for development that helped create reasonable workloads. Lastly, there are some great people at BabyCenter. People that value your expertise and really attempt to help develop employees. Especially technically. Part of my goals is to attend a conference. I have never had that before at a company.

Cons

It's not working at apple. We are often not creating the newest most exciting technologies. However, we do have some great people that are incredibly smart that value the balance. The next biggest downside is it's location next to the train station. If you live on the peninsula and have to take the train it's great, but if you live in SF or East Bay it's extremely difficult to get to. It's also a fairly big company and a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson's, this raises it's head in all sorts of weird ways. An inept kludgy HR system, an inability to give out effective laptops. Things like that.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue the focus on work life balance.