Ambitious goals overshadow toxic politics - Systems Engineer Applied Intuition Employee Review

Really interesting challenges, huge growth potential and ambition all over. In my experience management wants you to succeed so they try to recognize what you are good at and push you to do that even if it's not in the team you were originally assigned.

The time demanded of engineers tends to be very high and things tend to feel reactive because planning happens mostly on the short term. The culture makes some people want to stay in the office longer than they should

- Excellent business development strategy. Constant new customers and projects for engineers. If you wanted to run your own startup one day, you could do a lot worse than learn from Applied's strategies. - Fast-pace, challenging work for engineers. Very little abstraction means you touch most parts of the projects you work on. Good learning experiences. - Talented group of engineers to work with (see con about lack of seniority). - No-nonsense culture (at least at the start, see cons).

- Company has never learned to plan in my years here. Constantly making the mistake of compensating for lack of planning with crunching engineers. Attrition numbers tell the story. - Chasing best available business opportunities has led to its current success. It also means lack of focus and concerningly immature products given their age. - Shockingly does not grow comp with elevation to leadership positions. Lowballs new hires, then expects the existing equity to be enough reason to take on drastically more responsibility and give up technical work. - Great no-bullshit culture (drop BS meetings; technical need leads the way, not politics; avoid partisan politics at work, etc.) is degrading from the top. - New-grad heavy teams. Dearth of senior people to learn from is concerning. Good reason for new grads to move on quickly, or risk building bad habits. - Constantly uses valuation success in funding rounds to justify stunting comp growth. After 1-2 years you understand a truth: the company might be succeeding, but what does that have to do with you? - At some point, you learn enough from the firefighting. But the firefighting does not stop.