Pros
The original CEO and founder, whom I've grown to admire over the years, put tons of effort in providing and maintaining the developers’ happiness. He did that by putting an insane amount of work trying to find exciting people and projects for them to work on and checking in on them on a weekly basis to see if everything was fine. The mantra was "if this project isn't or you, don't worry, we'll find a new one together!" In my few years of experience, I've often heard companies talking about employee happiness, but no company had ever attempted to actually make it happen. Now for the first time, I saw someone who was ready to put in the time and effort necessary to achieve and maintain such an ambitious goal.
Cons
Unfortunately though, the CEO eventually decided to step down to dedicate more time to his family, taking with him all those incredible ideals he had instilled in the company. Since then, the company started to change and unfortunately not for the better. The encouragement and support that developers used to enjoy was gone, together with the immense dedication needed to find interesting and exciting people and projects for them to work on. Now, bad and demotivating projects were accompanied by a “take it or leave it” attitude from the management, with no regards towards those who actually had to put the work in. The new mantra now was “no one is essential, everyone can be substituted”. When I finally left, I was a bit sad to see this company's culture being slowly dismantled. The company still enjoyed talking about happiness, but no effort was actually made to maintain what the former CEO had built.
