Pros
- smart, kind people. Everybody is very welcoming and helpful - projects can be interesting if you're on the right one - I had great managers here, people cared about my career development. They set up a formal program to give people opportunities for mentorship. - annual stipend for learning and development which could be used to attend conferences abroad - "company culture" here is done pretty well - it feels grassroots and genuine. Employees direct it on their own with some support from the higher ups, rather than it being thrust upon the team from the corporate fun police - some freedom for employees to start initiatives and policy/process changes on their own - respect for work-life balance
Cons
- Layoffs: They laid off a bunch of people in May 2019, then 40 more in Feb 2020. They had set up an entire office of ~15 people in Atlanta in 2019 only to fire all of them 6 months later! - When COVID hit, they waited about 30 seconds to lay off 75 more people in March 2020. They blamed it on the virus, but it seems like most of these layoffs were already in the works and they were just being opportunistic. They described the layoffs as "temporary" but as far as I know, they haven't brought many people back. Rather than cutting people loose, they keep extending the "temporary" layoff so that they can avoid paying severance. When people do leave, they won't even allow them to buy their own used laptops and instead have employees mail them back to languish in a closet. - CEO and COO meddle in day-to-day work. Things move slowly because people worry about taking action without their approval, but it's difficult to find enough time with them to get their go-ahead. They often involve themselves in things and rush to sway them in a certain way without knowing the whole situation - CEO is worse than COO in this regard. - They don't seem to know who they are as a company. They have vague values like "Kind" "Brave" "Smart" etc. They started as an agency that did complicated JS development work and built their brand doing that. But then they decided that they wanted to be more of a "strategic partner". Nobody seems to know exactly what it means to be a strategic partner or how to market themselves as such. - They use a trillion different softwares to do one task each. I constantly had tabs open for Trello, Notion, google sheets, BambooHR, Slack, G-Mail, Nexonia, etc. etc. etc. - They're a tech agency with no CTO