Pros
Many companies make it their long term mission to foster a sense of togetherness among their members, yet never end up achieving it. Others advertise their culture as "family like" - which, at its best is mere platitude, and at its worst becomes a tool wielded by the executives to extract more time and effort from the employed. Arcules is neither of the two. Through a mixture involving a careful candidate screening process as well as a strict "No Brilliant As*holes" attitude, Arcules has succeeded in amassing a group of professionals who are genuinely passionate about putting out quality work, helping each other grow, and fostering a healthy workplace culture. My colleagues, irrespective of their title or the department they serve, are what make this place unlike all the other companies out there. If your dream job consists of checking off items on a list and collecting paychecks, you need to look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you look forward to being a part of a group working together to solve interesting problems, then you will have found your place at Arcules. This is by far the biggest, single most important reason behind the high number of stars I am awarding Arcules. There are other positive factors as well. The choice of tech stack at Arcules is cutting edge and forward-facing, meaning the time you spend learning and mastering the technology will remain relevant outside of Arcules. There is a relative lack of legacy code to wade through and many opportunities to build or rebuild interesting things from the ground up. The workflow process in place also empowers each engineer to make intelligent decisions that directly affect the end product. If you can base your claims and make reasonable arguments, your opinions will not go unheard here at Arcules. A few other thing that belong on the pros list: The office park is clean and well-maintained. The insurance benefits are excellent. Executives are down-to-earth and transparent. Lunch is catered in once a week. There are no bullsh*t metric-based review processes or stacked employee rankings in place.
Cons
Now the bad stuff. Arcules is a startup. It is a well-funded one, but it is still a startup. All the sense of uncertainty and instability that comes with working for a startup is felt every month as the sales numbers fluctuate (or worse, stay completely stagnant). We had managed to survive a number of critical junctions that risked the fate of the entire company but the race is far from over; There are at least dozens more to come in the near future, with bigger stakes. Every successful checkpoint or stage gate was a hard-won battle that demanded the sacrifice of sleep and weekends for many of its staff, and there is a constant stream of miniature scale battles that must be won every week. Thankfully, the organization has matured over the years and taken some valuable lessons to heart, but it still has a long series of obstacles to overcome. There is an overarching sense of chaos and disorganization hidden away at every corner, especially in the product/engineering department. Whether it is the half-baked process where nobody knows who owns a piece of the requirement, or the daily communication mishaps that inevitably results in details getting lost, the department as a whole is perpetually mired in a state of confusion and nobody seems to know what to do about it. Lastly, the departures. For whatever reason Arcules has been hemorrhaging engineering talent for the past few months. What started as a few farewells have turned into a small-scale exodus, and the sense of doom it generated has formed a festering wound threatening to decay the entire office morale. There is an ongoing effort to replace the departures and reverse the trend, but the current state of affairs remain grim.