Summer intern turned full time engineer
Pros
I interned at APT 3 few summers ago and have been at the company after graduating college. APT is an awesome place to work on a variety of levels - The work: Software development at APT is top notch. Whether you like implementing analytic innovations, scalable database and software infrastructure for massive data volumes, or designing intuitive interfaces and visualizations, there are plenty of technical challenges to get excited by. All of this is accentuated by twice-yearly hackathons and Idea Marketplace time (like Google's 20% time policy to work on a project not in your main workstream). APT also invests in their engineers - lots of structured technical training when you join and throughout your first year, informal lunchtime 'brown bag' sessions where teams share knowledge, and the ability to start going to conferences after your first year. The incredibly strong compensation never hurts either. The people: Everyone here is young and incredibly smart, but down to earth. It's not a competitive environment - everyone wants to collaborate and will happily stop their work to help someone else. The entire engineering team sits on the same floor so it's easy to get to know everyone in the department. APT also encourages inter-department communication through paying for employees from different departments to go out to lunch together or competitions like trivia or kickball between interdepartmental 'houses'. It's also a fairly social company - whether company-sponsored happy hours or picnics, team events for bonding or celebrating milestones, or the variety of internal social listservs. Interested APT employees use the listservs to coordinate sports teams, attending concerts, skiing trips, board game nights, and much much more. Coming straight out of college, it was easy to make new friends through these groups and then working with your friends makes time at the office that much better. DC: As someone from the east coast, I wanted a great tech career without having to move out west and DC is a great city. Many know it for politics, monuments, and museums, but it has so much more. There is a strong theater and comedy scene, lots of trails for biking and running, easy access to professional sports games, and access to athletic facilities like trapeze, parkour, and curling. Despite its many hiccups the subway system is one of the better ones in the US and makes it easy to get around DC and nearby suburbs in MD and VA. If you need to get out of DC, there are lots of Zipcars and it's easy to metro/Uber to Amtrak, Megabus/Boltbus/Greyhound, and 3 airports. All in all, APT is a great technology company in a fantastic city.
Cons
As the engineering team and product suite has grown, engineers no longer have a hand in all the features and don't always know the interesting problems other teams are tackling. It's a natural consequence of growth and the company takes admirable steps to address ir, but it's definitely something to know before joining.
