Pros
You own everything you touch. All aspects in terms of design, schedule, cost, complexity is yours and yours alone and are responsible for. This means a huge learning growth curve…however at an extremely high personal cost.
Cons
Salary and work-life balance is non existent. Reviews are intentionally skewed low so you are ‘continuously improving’ while killing yourself 50-60 hours of the week responding to messages and emails around the clock all week. Great if you’re single out of school without a life (which is the vast majority of people employed). Terrible if you have a family, hobbies, or any desire to live outside of work. Salaries are incredibly low for the market. Everyone employed after you will be offered more than you. If not for the California salary disclosure law, everyone employed would have been below the minimum (my entire team was until the law was enacted this year and then still we were only bumped up to the minimum). RSUs while great are too small to compensate for the low salary and the life commitment to work here also the yearly addition to RSUs don’t match the initial offering so after 5 years your overall compensation nose dives which then also incentivize you to leave before or at 5 years. Management is the best and the brightest engineering minds ever in the history of the world which also makes them the best managers ever so they are always right and know what’s best for you and your project you spend every minute of your employment working on.