Pros
The benefits are pretty good: health insurance, vacation, 401k matching and work life balance are very competitive. Can be a really fun environment, especially for very young employees, and there seems to be a lot of camaraderie. You can get hired with very little experience.
Cons
I don't know where to start. Very little diversity in hiring and it shows from a talent standpoint. There is a lot of self-congratulatory cheerleading here, but it rarely reflects the challenges that aren't being solved or the realities of the mediocre work being performed. Nepotism in hiring has also become a real issue. Very loose and poorly defined HR and hiring processes. It is totally unclear what standards are used to evaluate performance and even more unclear how people get promoted. It just seems to happen. Hire people young on the cheap and have serious difficulty retaining and dealing with people with experience. Turnover rate bordering on alarming. There are a lot of retreads in upper management who seemingly get promoted over and over to different jobs, when the possess very poor skill sets and have tenuous track records at Emma. They also tend to be the biggest cheerleaders. There is definitely an insider's club here and you will not get into it. Conversely, the camaraderie mentioned above can actually be very clicky, usually by department. Hiring decisions that don't make sense are common - will hire for a position, doesn't work out for some reason, then do not backfill the role at all like it never existed. What was the point in hiring for it in the first place? Also, pay is not competitive and company is small, so not much room for growth. There seems to be an obsession with doing things differently from everyone else, even when it doesn't make sense. This is reflected almost everywhere in the company and becomes an engrained part of the culture. Also a real emphasis on humility, but it often comes across as not questioning authority. Definitely not reflected from the top down. Aggression seems to come from weird angles here, too - often very unexpected. The product has been historically incredibly unstable. Leadership in general is very poor and it's never really clear who is in charge of anything, especially as it relates to product management. Leadership from other areas can be very meddlesome and it is killing the product. Roadmap seems to change a lot and is never really clear or very realistic. There seems to be an institutional inability to learn from previous mistakes here. There have been numerous technical errors that have been very costly. Also seem somewhat obsessed with constantly relaunching the web site rather than marshal resources towards the application then cheerlead about the relaunch as a major accomplishment, which it is not. Lots of activity does not equal actual achievement.