Strong customer focus, occasional growing pains - Sr. Engineer 3dB Labs Employee Review

- Smart coworkers with great interpersonal skills. Everyone really knows their stuff and works together to get the job done well. Some of the smartest engineers that I've ever met working in my field are guys who I work with here. Owners are friendly and compassionate, employees are friendly and outgoing, and there really is a true lack of 'toxicity' here. - Decently good pay for the position, great benefits, generous PTO, and plenty of incidentals: free pop, snacks, coffee, tea, catered lunch on Wednesdays, etc. - Very interesting work and projects. Our internal lab is fully stocked with all of the materials that we need to do our jobs, and our offices have modern work equipment that reduces friction. The actual day to day work is also fascinating. The work we do here matters and gives good feelings of a sense of accomplishment and purpose. - Strong focus in a niche market in technologies that don't really have any real competition. The senior engineers here invented technologies that are world renowned and recognized by the DoD. The demand for our stuff has skyrocketed and led to massive growth. The company was once a small startup-like business that's really made a name for itself. That's led to good market perception and stellar business posture, securing prosperity for just about all of us involved. - S tier job culture where everyone respects one another. No office politics, corporate BS, toxic coworkers, sycophancy, backstabbing, etc. The culture of mutual respect for one another and a strong focus on meeting customer needs makes the climate of 3dB a breath of fresh air for someone like me who came from companies with a polar opposite work environment. - Good work is not only recognized but celebrated. If you are doing good work, you actually hear about it which is nice. - Lots of free things, events, and parties, being put on to celebrate the growth of the company is really great to see. I haven't taken part of any of these things for some of the reasons listed in the cons section. - Flexible work hours and hybrid work arrangements are possible.

- Company is growing so fast that many organizational aspects of the company are starting to feel the burn. Certain departments are growing and scaling to match the increasing demand for our products, but there are still many organizational bottlenecks and single points of failure that need to be resolved. If you are working in a role with other folks in the same role or area, your workload will be stable but if you're the only person in your role you are stuck handling your duties for literally the entire company and will be working constantly. With the company growing as quickly as it is, I fear that folks stuck in those precarious SPOF positions might burn out entirely unless changes are made. My own personal schedule has become so jam-packed with work related duties that I ironically don't have any real free time or bandwidth to take part in any of the celebrations or parties that celebrate this rapid growth. - A lack of clear job titles, roles, and responsibilities has made career growth and career opportunities at 3dB ambiguous at best and completely undefined with no real clarity regarding how to move up and or over in the company at worst. The senior engineers are simply the guys who have been with the company for a number of years or are simply deemed as being 'senior' by leadership and management. There are no performance reviews and no clear guidelines for both ownership and accountability for your current work along with a lack of promotional structure, titles, ranks, etc. which has made internal growth largely non-existent and has led to some folks being let go due to 'poor performance' despite the expectations for their roles not really being defined at all. The company is redefining leadership at higher levels, but the lower levels of the company are remaining largely untouched, with the middle and lower tiers of the organization being the same for a number of years, despite the growth of the business. - A feast or famine type of work environment where your work schedule for a day or week is largely unpredictable. 8-12 hour days where some folks have to come into the office early in the morning (6 am or 7 am) just to stay on top of work is commonplace. There's no real structure or bureaucracy that filters and organizes engineering work apart from: customer requests come in -> engineering management slates the most important work for the roadmap while lower priority issues get lost in the weeds -> work deemed as being wanted or needed is slated for a release and may or may not be worked on prior to a product release -> release ships with potentially questionable development and release quality -> repeat. 'Offroading' is common as well, where people simply 'know' what needs to be done without being told what to do, which can lead to a lack of communication on priorities and expectations for major milestones. There's also a lack of clear roles for product releases along with no real playbook or rulebook defining how to ship our software with predictable rigor, which has led to release and software quality issues. We have gotten better at this, but there is still room for improvement in our release processes that really shouldn't be leaving room for error. - Nepotism. I also believe this has led to people coming on to the team with a lack of qualifications to really perform their job well, which may have been avoidable if an outside hire were being chosen for a role instead of someone's friend or family member. - At this point, the size of the company along with its growth velocity and trajectory has made 3dB a small company instead of a startup. Yet it still tries to operate like a startup in a lot of ways. One person taking on multiple roles, a single person operating in a single role with their head being buried in work, a lack of organizational tiers, and no real outlook on how the company is planning on scaling its own internal organizational facets does indeed exist and I think has led to a lot of the aforementioned issues.

- benefits are good; including tuition reimbursement for grad school - was able to resume build off of a high impact role - free food/gifts, good facilities, many “bells and whistles”

- senior employees and leadership are all bafflingly incompetent and cannot communicate to save their lives - I basically spent my entire term there twiddling my thumbs and waiting for other people to provide me with information/materials for documentation - I tried many times to get access to these materials myself but was told that I “didn’t need it” - my direct manager as well as the president of the company were very passive aggressive and unprofessional about me leaving