Pros
- The technology is genuinely pretty interesting, and when it all combines into one big machine, seeing all the systems work is neat. - You get a lot of responsibility with your work, and management is relatively hands-off with how you do it, so long as it gets done. - You're expected to make the occasional mistake, which is refreshing. - The general atmosphere in meetings and team calls is one where you're expected to ask questions of upper management, and hard questions aren't shunned (although depending on the question, you may not actually get a good answer or one that satisfies) - Team socials are infrequent & somewhat casual. Still awkward, but alright all-things-considered. - It's a lot-of-hats kind of workplace. If you want variety in your work, with the flexibility, responsability, and ability to jump around, this is a pretty decent start-up for that. - Hours aren't tracked, you aren't expected to do a solid 9-5 every day. You can end a bit earlier some days, work a little later other days. As long as your work is done on-time and to a degree of quality, you're relatively free to work as best for you (although if that's remotely, they don't like that, they want people in-office)
Cons
- Projects and features are erratically planned and prioritised. Whilst plans are made well in advance based on Half-Years, the actual work done can change on a monthly or weekly basis. Depending on your job-role, this can completely upset other plans. - When it comes to culture, you're able to negotiate and deliberate on features/timelines for your tasks. But when it comes time to negotiating issues like Office/Remote hours, or whether you're allowed to not go to socials, management absolutely does not compromise. They'll say they listen to you, but over time will progressively not budge until you compromise with them. - The budget goes to the venues, not to the development team. You're expected to work odd hours outside of the 9-5 without guaranteed compensation, and requests for staff/testing/time have gone unheeded in the past. - Not as much time is put into maintenance as is put into new features. At some points it felt like we had work for 6 people needing to be done by 3 without much overarching planning around it; a key problem is having new projects to deploy whilst trying to fit in maintenance & new features into that on top of the older ones. - It's taken an oddly long amount of time to fill certain roles, and likewise some staff will vanish; over time the consistent message was "they aren't/weren't a good fit for the company/culture". This desired "fit" from my experience seemed to be that they weren't ready to do certain tasks on a whim for the company, where up to that point the person in question was a solid employee, all it takes is one critical decision and you're gone.