Pros
- The tech stack is good. - Has a good number of senior engineers with good technical knowledge, you could learn a lot from them. - A growing product that seems to have found a good product market fit.
Cons
Where do I start with the cons? First of all, please don't be fooled by the fake reviews of the company. They are probably put by a single person or everyone in the company was made to post a good review as a part of some marketing campaign. I'll try to start: - Nobody in the company understands the concept of work-life balance. When I say this, I don't mean my expectations from a startup were a set 9-5 working hours. Building and shipping fast is every startup's motto, and long hours with mutual agreement and understanding between teammates are very common and more than okay. But, at Decentro, you would be expected to stay on deployment calls until 3 am and would receive a call from your manager the next morning at 8 am. On those deployment calls, a bunch of guys would behave as if it's their hostel dorm and if you refuse to be a part of it, the response you would get from everyone is: "what better have you got to do with your life?". This response is common if you try to have a life at all. - I had not seen such an apathetic CEO in my life. His ego is skyrocketing. He believes he has figured out how to run a business and that gives him the right to not care about being a good human being or being a human being at all for that matter. There have been instances when he publicly humiliated employees on Slack channels as a means to set examples for other employees. And that is just one of many apathetic and controlling things he does. - A lot of apathy and control streams down from the CEO and flows to other people in leadership roles forcing them to micro-manage their direct reports. You would hardly feel you have control and autonomy over your own time. - In the name of "an amazing culture" they market generic parties and a yearly off-site but don't seem to understand the basics of having and building a culture where everyone is trusted, treated with respect, empathy and kindness, feels heard and understood more often than not, and, given control over their time and is encouraged to take ownership of their components. - The saddest part of it all is that it is almost impossible to explain these issues to people who don't believe they are issues because they don't understand the hows and whys of it. If you do try, you would be gaslit into believing that it is just you who is problematic and not the company or the culture. Like how would you explain to a kid 2 squared is 4 if they don't know the concept of numbers? It is the same with them. - The number of female engineers is strikingly low, the ratio is as bad as 1:30 Unless you are willing to trade off your peace of mind, sense of sanity, 3/4th of your daytime (from 24 hours) and most of your mental bandwidth for learnings (which would be hindered by the former factors) from a good product, please think if it is really worth it.