Healthy culture, genuine people and a killer product
Pros
Regardless of their primary responsibility, engineers have a unique opportunity to learn a ton about Linux, compilers, security and so on while being a visible, key contributor to the company's success. The company has some (literally) world famous ICs and founders. They're yours to learn from. There is free reign for ambitious, hard-working folks to take ownership and make their mark. Historically, the company has also done well at weeding out harmful elements. The product is the only real one in the market. The company does not believe in FUD, actively educating the public on intelligent security practice and technical details. The founders are extremely smart, thoughtful, great people. All of the executives are mature with families and they've been through this all before. While the sales cycle took a little while to gain steam, it just gets easier over time. The company has a number of very high profile customers and that number is growing quickly. It is a very exciting thing to be a part of. Furthermore the company is very open to criticism and new ideas from anyone. It's on you to make a good point. They are generally very transparent about decisions after the fact.
Cons
The engineering and product organizations struggled for a while to develop the right level of communication between executives and core teams. Too many decisions (for example, on hiring) are made at the executive level without coordination or buy-in below. The engineering organization hasn't done a great job of actively distributing trust and ownership past the executive level. For example, customer interactions are handled (and bottle-necked) by one or two individuals in engineering while many other capable engineers receive no training or exposure outside their teams. Additionally, this lack of engineers exposed to market problems has led to inefficient scheduling of work over the years. For years the engineering organization also struggled to hire capable senior engineering managers. This means engineering teams are sometimes forced to optimize locally at the expense of globally smart decisions. From time to time, the engineering organization has also turned over all responsibility on key matters such as hiring practice, employee growth, and technical planning to HR, project managers, product managers or sales. The entire company is the worse for it. These groups should be treated as peers and partners, not authorities. It is not their fault. This can be reasonably fixed by building up capable, dedicated senior engineering management.
