Pros
• Engineers, Product Managers and designers at individual contributor roles are some of the finest folks you could get to work with. • 4 months of paid parental leave • Snacks, free food many times during the week. • A lot of fitness events
Cons
• Though most engineering teams are good, the Infrastructure team is absolutely incompetent and is made up of folks who can’t upgrade a software on linux or database server without causing a serious outage. We had to maintain and manage our own servers while working in analytics team to make up for this team’s short comings. • No respect for hard work, employee’s potential or skills employees bring to the table. It’s all playing favoritism. The same core group keeps getting promoted every 2 years despite the product being as crappy today (reflects in stock price and user activity) as it was 5 years ago Let me summarize my experience in the product and analytics teams - • In the last 18+ months, I haven’t seen a single experiment that was conducted by the product team. Yes - for a so-called market leading digital health startup the product and analytics teams performed 0 experiments while making 2 massive overhauls to the product. • Most leaders in the firm simply have no clue how to define the success of a product or feature. If you get into a numbers or metrics argument you will feel like you are banging your head against a brick wall. • All good analysts in analytics team have quit in under 12 months and for most part have moved on to really good companies and roles outside of castlight. The main reasons - 1) too much time maintaining broken data infrastructure which analytics leadership thinks is a trivial task 2) no one in product takes analysis seriously since the culture is not data driven 3) performing meaningless savings calculations which any person with elementary knowledge of stats would say is deeply flawed and filled with biases • After having many arguments over data quality, metrics and spending countless sleepless nights (had to maintain the server single handedly after the good analysts had left) I was eventually fed up doing analytics for this group. I wanted to move on and look for other roles at Castlight but very soon found out that there is no mobility within the company. All the grand stories on how you can build your career and look for other opportunities on the castlight website are all bogus stories (just like the product). I would never recommend anyone to join the analytics or product teams at Castlight.