Pros
If you were to evaluate Jibo solely by the people who work there, it's a pool of incredible talent, passion, and energy. It's hard to ask for more fun, interesting coworkers at a tech company. The technology stack is complex and I learned a lot while working there. The fact that everyone is working on challenging technical problems on a day-to-day basis, creating a hum of activity and purpose in the office, does a lot to obscure the “cons” of working at Jibo.
Cons
I can’t accuse management at Jibo of not dreaming big. They wanted the robot to not only compete with products like Amazon Alexa or Google Home, but to be the next iPhone. It would be an amazing robotic home companion that consumers would gladly pay $700 for. Unfortunately, my impression of management was that they never had a very clear idea of how to achieve that. There seemed to be a lot of, “well, we’ll figure it out as we go” or “our third-party developers will step up and create great content”. When I was there, management was still pushing “visioning exercises” and hackathons to generate application ideas. This might have made sense in 2015, but it wasn’t where the company needed to be in 2017. The lack of clear direction from above trickled down into the working environment. People generally understood their own local domain, but there were regular coordination and communication issues between teams. Software or the build process often broke, often as a result of some change that not everyone got (or understood) the memo for. New employees weren’t well-supported or given much direction. Documentation would quickly fall out of date, and it was hard to keep track of the current state of the architecture. QA was overworked. There was a lot of dependence on trendy workflow processes that worked fine on a granular level, but didn’t address the macro issues. Valuable employee time was wasted on frivolous distractions such as useless meetings or a day of New Age-y team bonding exercises. If you've seen recent promotional videos of the robot online, ask yourself why they don't show anything particularly hype-worthy. Then, consider the most obvious answer to that question. I can’t recommend working here, unless your goal is to get enough experience to join whatever companies are sucking up Jibo veterans a year from now. Throwing a bunch of new hires into the trenches might get some sort of basically functional robot out the door by the end of the year, but I’ve never known a company’s deeper problems to be fixed by adding more developers at the last minute.