Pros
- Veho has an excellent business model that fills a needed niche in an increasingly competitive logistics space. Lots of great clients, too.
- Software engineers and product teammates were excellent, lots of fantastic perspectives that made my year there priceless. The principal engineer was one of the best IC's I've ever had the good fortune to work with.
- Cutting-edge technology is the minimum, bleeding-edge technology is the standard.
- Highly-impactful work, for sure. I'm very proud of my work there.
- Being overworked and under-appreciated on critical, bleeding-edge projects meant that I grew a ton as an engineer. Veho was a great trial-by-fire and despite the terrible aspects of the job, I'm very glad I had the opportunity to learn there. If you want to ride a bucking bronco during your career, I suggest Veho; you'll probably feel achy and burned out after, but you'll learn a lot.
Cons
- "Profit at all costs". Whereas many startups took the "growth at all costs" mindset, Veho's C-Suite takes the "profit at all costs" mindset. Hire-and-fire cycle has occurred multiple times with various areas (customer/driver support, engineering, product) where operations are built out to meet market need, scaled out, made efficient, etc. After scale has been achieved and a roadmap is set for optimization, layoffs occur.
- Extremely hit-or-miss engineering management during my time there. I believe most EM's have been converted back to IC's, but there was an issue of capable IC's being thrust into management roles without enough of the leadership and management training given in enterprise. This resulted in gross mismanagement of performance evaluation, career development, and basic operational issues; I don't think anyone who caused problems were "bad" people but they weren't ready to be managers. Some of the managers were very good, but stretched thinly.
- Heavily top-down prioritization, and one-way communication. Veho's engineering leadership mostly emphasized downwards streams of communication, rather than including upstream comms; a command structure rather than leadership structure. This left them with serious blind spots to the nature of our product portfolio, where only fires would alert them to a technical need (which could've been communicated by other means, i.e. trained and empowered management). Of course, those issues are heaped onto the workload of IC's one way or another.
- Little or no regard for the effects of attrition on domain knowledge and organizational morale. Rather than building up a capable organization of motivated individuals with institutionalized technical/domain knowledge, leadership treats corporate teammates as disposable, and cares more about keeping the lights on for the product portfolio. Being an SME is not a guarantee that you'll be included at the table in any decisions, much less given any form of job security or advancement.
- As an IC, all of the above resulted in a prospectless career trajectory where I was expected to be the SME on several critical projects, handle critical areas of support, do on-call for other people's products, etc without even a yearly raise. Plenty of rough weekends and tough conversations throughout the weeks as my own achievements rewarded me with... even more work.
