Pros
You will work with standout engineers and occasionally collaborate with top open-source talent. If that aligns with your goals and you have an offer, stop reading and sign it. Stick around for a bit, build connections and then bail before bridges burn.
Cons
(In no particular order.) [Burnout] Expect to be overworked. Burnout isn't about the sheer workload but chaotic leadership, including the leaders at the very top who love to dish out side tasks to engineers even while they are knee-deep in quarterly commitments. Engineers are expected to juggle these side tasks without forgetting their main duties. [Leadership] The leaders are a mess. Top tier leaders often bypass the organizational heads, randomly assign tasks and hold engineers accountable while simultaneously ignoring the product managers. The engineering leaders and the product managers then spend more time chasing updates than fixing issues. Middle managers are the most incompetent bunch, busy pleasing their bosses. [Leadership churn] No wonder the leaders don't stick around. When the top tier leaders regularly undermine their direct reports by bypassing them, leaders exit every year or so. If stability in leadership is vital for your daily focus, look elsewhere. [Processes] Even the simplest discussions turn into a bureaucratic nightmare. Stand-up meetings? More like document marathons where you're stuck collaborating on a never-ending report attempting to record last week's tasks, this week's plans and even the crystal ball forecast for the week after. But that's not all. Engineers are expected to justify every move, linking tasks to quarterly plans, creating more documents and endlessly sharing it all. What starts as a quick 15-minute check-in morphs into an hour-long, real-time document collaboration saga with leaders and middle managers clamoring for unnecessary, redundant details that drown any hope of efficiency. Multiple such stand-up meetings in a week and you are looking at a healthy work culture! While thorough documentation isn't inherently bad, even setting up a quick 15-minute meeting requires a preliminary document outlining the task, tagging stakeholders, and sharing it beforehand. The process repeats with additional documents for meeting notes, decisions and justifications, leading to an overwhelming number of documents to produce weekly. Somehow, it's never deemed sufficient.
