That is the room where all of the eng team worked, but certainly not how it looked on a normal day. If you look, you can spot three clusters of 4 desks around the edges of the room in this picture. There were ~10 clusters of similar size that scattered around a large open space.
The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling
Sometime around 8-10 years ago, requiring company approval for secondary sales started becoming a popular restriction to put into ISO grants (prior to that, it was just right of first refusal on sales). It's largely unfavorable to employees, but it does prevent some pretty bad situations. The benefits of this restriction were explained to me as two major things:
1) By preventing secondary sales, the company can control the going price for the stock. This means when the company has an independent third party do a 409a valuation, they don't have to take into account high third party sales, which would push the 409a up. Not inflating the 409a is beneficial to employees that want to leave the company and exercise stock. It means their AMT tax hits won't be as bad.
2) It also means the company/board get to control who are investors in the company, and thus who has the ability to request to relevant internal company information (like financials).
Given I had a job while interviewing, I was driving it as fast as I was comfortable. But the part that was important to me as a candidate is that I was getting feedback within 1 business day, and getting the next step scheduled for later that same week.
I previously worked at Stripe. Mark's post mirrors my experience internally as a hiring manager, and as a candidate. But as you said, at scale things get harder; I'm sure the experience does vary and some percentage of people come out with experiences that don't match the ideal.
My own experience was that Stripe was able to take me from a prospect to a hire in less than 30 days. My interviews and calls were all on Friday, and I would hear back on Monday with results and schedule the next round for that very same week.
My last 2 jobs have been working on developer productivity for 100+ developer organizations. One is a monorepo, one is not. Neither really seems to result in less work, or a better experience. But I've found that your choice just dictates what type of problems you have to solve.
Monorepos are going to be mostly challenges around scaling the org in a single repo.
Polyrepos are going to be mostly challenges with coordination.
But the absolute worst thing to do is not commit to a course of action and have to solve both sets of challenges (eg: having one pretty big repo with 80% of your code, and then the other 20% in a series of smaller repos)
The worst part about that room was not the open feeling, but rather the silver walls and ceiling