Pros
- The people that I worked with are phenomenal, genuinely the smartest and kindest people, and true friendships have been forged while I worked there. - Working hours were flexible and could accommodate people from different regions or students that would work after classes etc. - During some moments there were exciting challenges to tackle. Compared to some big corporations where most of my days was spent on trivial bugfixes with zero creativity required, this was very fulfilling. - Tools used for development, team communication, version control, CI & CD were standard not home-grown solutions like it might be with big companies. These were also mostly well maintained and professionally done (by the developers, see negatives).
Cons
- The work performed at the company is 100% outsourced work from larger companies. This leaves little room for career growth and some of these projects did not align with the skills of the employees. - At the time of my employment there was almost no organizational structure. Most employees were developers with a project lead sometimes provided by the clients or a person on the team might get selected for such a role (without experience in what that takes). - Career growth does not exist within the company, you might be surrounded by amazing people, but there really weren't many opportunities to share this knowledge. - Mentoring, coaching or performance feedback did not exists. I think this was worst for medior engineers since they were mostly expected to perform as well as senior staff without a clear plan on how to get there. - The company ran on its own self-hosted infrastructure, and if you wanted it to work, *you* needed to maintain it. There were no dedicated people to manage this infrastructure, it was done by the GPU engineers; who are not professionals in it. - Related to infrastructure: securing funding to improve / extend it to better support the growing team could not be arranged in ~2 years. - The company offers very low transparency regarding benefits like year end bonuses. In many companies yearly bonuses follow pre-set and agreed upon rules based on company profits or stock value. At Stream HPC the amount was magically pulled out of a hat. Bonuses were also delayed to the point it was unclear whether they would even happen at all. - Salaries were delayed several times, and paid the very last legal date other times.