Pros
I was hired at Proton London office as a contract Rust Engineer. I was treated really well throughout the duration of my contract. The company is going places, especially with the current geopolitical situation. Everyone I met seemed to care about ethics, privacy, and security. They live up to the values they promote, which is so important for a company whose reputation depends so much on users trust. People on my team were smart, hard working, good at their craft and were a pleasure to work with. If you're interested in web, mobile, cybersec and care about their mission, it's a fantastic place to work - despite their notorious interview process. Other pros I can think of: - Working hours are compact but fairly intense. Most people start and finish at reasonable times and work hard inbetween (just like it should be) - I've not seen anyone having to pull crazy overtime - Offices around Europe which you can visit and work from - People work from abroad once in a while - Company mostly runs their own stack instead of the usual Google/Microslop/AWS infra. A true rarity and breath of fresh air - They have an impressive collection of Slack emoticons which I will geniunly miss :D I know it sounds silly, but I haven't seen that anywhere else I worked
Cons
The CEO, while being very passionate about privacy, is very micromanage'y. It makes sense to be involved in every low-level hiring decision when you're running a scrappy startup, but it's pretty weird when the company has hundreds of employees. The 3days/week in-office requirement itself is reasonable, as long as your team is in the same office. What does not make much sense is being required to come into an office when most of your team is somewhere else in Europe. You can easily end up like I did, commuting in just to spend the day on virtual calls, which is pretty dumb. Salaries/rates are alright at best, if you're in a big tech hub like London they're not very competitive, but I guess they somewhat compensate with shares if that's something you care about. Their approach to open source is... confusing? Can't put my finger on it, but even after working there for several months, I still could not quite figure out what their actual position on it was.
