Pros
Lightspeed was a really fun company to work at. Very modern, always up-to-date using the latest technologies. Needed a paid license for some proprietary IDE? You got it! Don't need a license? Well they'll give you one anyway. As a developer, it's paradise because your manager is probably a cool guy and you have every tool you could possibly want at your disposal. They also pro-actively look at improving their process, which no company I've worked at has ever done (despite talking about it frequently). The kitchen is stuffed with food, the building is quite chic (though it's annoying to have music playing all day while you're trying to work). There are many smart people at the company, so there's always an opportunity to learn, and the company does many lunch-and-learns (though their usefulness is subjective). The gender balance was quite good for developers, which is a rarity in most companies (not 50-50, but good). Dax is a friendly and approachable CEO, and knows how to treat his employees (with regards to the parties he throws).
Cons
The focus of the company seems to change every other week. It seems like we learn a new buzzword they're trying to sell every company meeting. The HR department is sort of... non-existent. They're all really nice people, but they have no real power to do anything or help. The benefits are average to below-average. The bare minimum for vacation is provided (2 weeks if I recall correctly), but the salary was competitive. The company as a whole is very clique-ish. Among development groups, each individual project is ultra-defensive on its role within the company, probably to justify their existence, but it's just frustrating to see a company with so many products and yet no one is working together. Maybe this has improved since I left, I don't know. Work/life balance ranged from decent to terrible. Some weeks I was working upwards of 60+ hours, but making no real progress toward any end goal. In many cases, the end goal was a moving target that was barely defined beyond a few words (like, "it should work"). The reason I left, however, is as follows: it looks like the majority of the development leads across projects suffer from god complexes. In my team in particular, I got to watch a developer with ~10 years of experience be treated like he could barely spell due to a flaw in a design he had come up with (for a truly non-critical component of the product). I've seen guys with ~5 years experience be referred to as junior engineers. There's no trust whatsoever among leads to allow their developers to do things by themselves. My team was so horribly broken that nobody (except the lead) had any confidence in their own work. I moved to another team, and it was the same issue: everyone (except the lead) was essentially broken, second-guessing their own work. I'd sit in design meetings with colleagues where we'd bounce ideas around, help flesh out ideas, then watch them crumble during reviews with the lead because they seemed to lose their ability to communicate (literally, there was something psychologically wrong with the situation). The development course of the products is so closed-minded, decided unilaterally by one person with little regard for feedback from their engineers. Unless you're a code monkey, this is so annoyingly frustrating.
