Pros
- co-workers are great; everyone was uniformly pleasant and all key members of the tech team were extremely talented people beyond what I've seen at other companies with both soft and hard skills; most would go above and beyond to assist if you had an issue - current CTO made some huge improvements to both the stack and the culture since assuming the role a few years ago - some developers seem to really thrive here; if you can find the time you can be granted a lot of room to make very big improvements. I think if you know what you're getting into there's a chance this can be a place where you'll grow massively - CEO seems genuinely well-intentioned and feels like someone who will have future successes - remote work - Health insurance - Compared to other places the diversity of the team was quite good - I think some roles are possibly less heavily hit by the issues around pivoting and tech debt - not VC funded, which is interesting and impressive in this field that they got this far without it (I'm not sure it was a conscious choice though)
Cons
- There seemed to be no clear long-term direction, resulting in an endless stream of ridiculous pivots and sudden deadlines chasing after a new contract or market demographic - ...this unsurprisingly led to significant, long-term tech debt from all the additional logic forks along with a lack of trust in any future major pivots - Very democratic for the most part but pivots were always announced in an autocratic manner and usually with very little clarity on why/if they were important (several definitely weren't) - Work socials were very alcohol focused. I know people make fun of escape rooms and bowling but there's a reason they're still a thing! - Asides from health insurance it felt like there was a lot of penny pinching; licenses for software seemed harder to get than other places I've worked and it took a ridiculous number of attempts to get an incorrect deduction from my salary reverted - Redundancy was handled professionally and respectfully but I've yet to hear another tech worker friend who was offered the legal minimum - and I'll just repeat the pivots because I can't overstate how bad they were