Pros
- The codebase for the project I worked on was decent and overall pretty easy to work with. - For the project I was on, it was a good work-life balance. I heard people on other projects had overtimes, but it wasn't the case for the team I was on - I had good learning opportunities at this job
Cons
- The CEO is extremely rude. In my last month at the company, I personally heard him referring to entire engineering team as pathetic (in the engineering Slack channel) and also calling all of us f-word in person. I heard him scream angrily and curse at other people and say other very rude things. It would be pretty hard to list here all stories I heard personally about him being shockingly rude and arrogant - just because there are quite a few of them. This is the main reason I am giving 1 star to my review. It would have been 2 or 3 stars otherwise - When I worked at Brinqa, we had ~8-10 developers on this project I worked on. CEO personally reviewed every pull request. And he took a very long time to do it. I easily had 5 to 10 open pull requests at a time, and some of them took WEEKS for him to review. And just to clarify - not for me to address the comments. It could easily take 5 days, or 2 weeks for him to just click the 'approve' button. And then I had to often deal with humongous merge conflicts that piled up while I had 5 open PRs for a week. If you are a developer, you know how annoying this is - There is no engineering leadership of any kind. - There are no software development processes of any kind as well. When I started a year ago, we were late with the alpha-release of this new project I was working on. A year later when I left, we still did not release. - I spent a year at Brinqa, and I did not know who my manager is up until 1 month before I left - I never had 1x1 with anybody to talk about my career development, annual goals to set, or just talk about any of the concerns I had - There is no transparency in the company. Are we profitable? What are we trying to do: go IPO, or get acquired, or what? I don't know. No all hands or company announcements about direction we want to take - The upper management never gives any updates of any kind. They never announced new hires, so new people would just show up in the office. They also don't usually announce when somebody leaves the company. So one day you'd just notice that somebody isn't there. Are they sick? Are they fired? Did they quit? Who knows. Management clearly doesn't think it's important to communicate what is happening with people who work there - When I asked for a raise, it took them 3 weeks (!) to get back to me and set up a performance review meeting. They didn't even say 'we are busy now, but we'll get back to you'. They just ignored me, until I asked about it again. - Leadership has no trust in people and takes no responsibility. - The benefits are bad. This is the worst insurance I've ever had over 5 years working in software, hands down. Only 12 days of PTO per year. No 401k. No stocks. No bonuses. No other stuff - There is no team culture, and management doesn't do much to establish it. Most people just don't talk to each other
