Pros
* tremendous individual ownership and impact (e.g., your work could directly increase revenue by tens of millions of dollars) * strongly data-driven culture and good monitoring tools * excellent interview process (behavioral interviewing, bar raisers, pre-brief/de-brief, etc.) * lots of really great people * some very cool projects (generated by those people) * many great cultural tenets (at least on paper) * above median total compensation for the Seattle tech industry
Cons
* very top-down culture (a few teams manage to resist this, for awhile) * internal tech is dated and underinvested (e.g., website built on Perl) * benefits and employee equipment are substandard for the tech industry (e.g., almost no perks, 3-5yo laptop for you) * power is highly concentrated in managers, especially due to the peer review feedback process (anonymized and filtered by the manager; so the manager has total control over your performance) * employees aren't valued. You're there to do a job, for which you're compensated. That's it. "Every day is day 1." = "how you performed last year is irrelevant" * compensation is skewed and miscommunicated to the employee. To wit: * There are no signing bonuses; that's just compensation shifted from stock to cash in year 1 (and sometimes year 2). * If the stock goes up and your actual compensation exceeds your target compensation, you will get no subsequent stock grants (until you're back under target). * Vesting schedule is every 6 months after a year, at 5%, 5%, 10%, 10%, 15%, 15%, 20%, 20%. This design is intentional, because many employees attrit after the first year or two. A large fraction of employees quit after year 4, when the first stock grant has completely vested. Overall undesired attrition is > 14%. * NYT article is 85-90% true. Quite a few managers (at all levels) are really horrible to work for.