Pros
- extremely committed (albeit overworked) team that smiles through it all - profitable core product despite somewhat volatile stock market and global tech crunch - recent upper management role shakeup finally aligns talent and experience with responsibilities - highly rated core real estate product still nets a lot of positive feedback from customers and this feedback is surfaced internally to the broader team - complete re-write and re-architecture of underlying codebase by top-notch developer who is still at the company being iteratively adopted and is now pretty much feature complete Summary It's not all bad. There's a lot of talented and really hardworking people at this company who are boots-to-the-ground, get-it-done kind of workers and they are the glue that holds this ship together. The core product is indeed profitable. If you're happy to basically just do what you're told and don't mind a constant stream of changing priorities, there's excitement to be had, and a lot of the deeply rooted core quality issues on the technical side are well and truly on their way to being ironed out.
Cons
- six resignations in nearly as many months across multiple positions ranging from junior to C-level - instances of the founder bullying and aggressively questioning people - blame culture emerges if it helps upper management save face - overtime work culture that prioritises product development at speed and at any cost - poor quality has been normalised to the point where multiple hotfixes per week is commonplace - severe lack of role boundaries and separation of duties: Product and Scrum responsibilities aren't meaningfully isolated, the same is often true for Builders and Stakeholders (i.e. engineers being told *how* to build things by non-technical stakeholders instead of being given a priority of *what* to build), lots of own-goals and Agile fouls - toxic positivity: founder views critical feedback of pretty much anything as sacrilegious , upper management in particular showers praise on people who highlight the positives and discourages people from raising points raised to the contrary by labelling them as not being "team players" - gated hypocrisy: during all-hands founder claimed he was unaware of regular overtime being undertaken but later contradicted himself by complaining about employees who speak up about overtime not being more like other employees who fix things no matter what time it is and who make themselves available pretty much 24/7, which shows an not only an awareness but an expectation of said overtime - Dunning-Kruger effect reigns supreme: lack of expertise combined with lack of self-awareness throughout middle and upper management with regards to certain areas (DevSecOps, software architecture, quality planning and process design, and Agile/Scrum in particular) results in misplaced confidence, poor planning, and poor execution by people empowered to make decisions they have limited ability in or domain knowledge of Summary If you accept a role at this company make sure to CYA and take down notes of any conversations you have in private, especially with the founder and upper management - you'll thank yourself for it if you ever get the founder or certain others offside. If you are an experienced Agile practitioner you'll likely have a really hard time working here. While the technical issues are on their way to being solved, the lack of expertise and competence in various areas is not something that is going to change any time soon, especially given the at times hostile work environment and treatment of people who dare to dissent - pretty much all of them end up leaving.