A Harrowing Experience - Business Analyst Chain.io Employee Review

I hesitate to write this, because I truly want Chain to succeed. Unfortunately I feel like I need to give a warning. Chain claims to be a healthy place to work, constantly patting itself on the back for respecting work/life balance and employee mental health. The reality is that Chain will ALWAYS put the customer first. There’s extreme pressure on a small team of analysts, each trying to juggle three-full time position’s worth of complex technical work. They keep promising to hire more help but it takes 6 months at least before a new analyst can confidently work on their own - and that’s if anyone has the time to help train. Chain has a bad habit of agreeing to terrible integrations with unrealistic timelines in order to bring on more logos. While there are some brilliant engineers at Chain (the underlying platform is incredible), the delivery team business analysts work with is primarily made up of contract junior developers who require significant technical guidance. Management understands that developers should only work on one or two tasks at a time as their job requires intense concentration - don’t expect the same consideration if you’re an analyst. It doesn’t matter if you have more work in your plate than hours in the day, if a new contract is signed it’s expected that the analyst begins work immediately. You’ll spend your morning/early afternoon on client calls and at the end of the day after everyone else logs off, you’ll finally have time to dig into the technical work requiring uninterrupted concentration. I was putting in 12 hours days regularly and was still drowning. Management has no idea how to do your job but they’ll come down on you for any rework or delays. Of the two weeks of vacation I took over a year and a half, I was called to log on and work on three separate occasions. If you reach a breaking point and ask for help, management would rather blame you for “burning yourself out” instead of taking responsibility for putting their people in absolutely terrible positions. All that being said, if you’re excited by challenging work where you’ll learn new technical skills every day, Chain is a great opportunity - I gained a ton of experience and was able to leverage what I learned at Chain into a much better job. Just know that you’ll probably be doing so at the cost of your mental health and personal relationships.