Pros
I went there with a friend, and the entire design team both stateside and in Serbia was great. I still talk with them 2 years later, after working with them for only 5 months. My salary was very good. Great benefits.
Cons
Literally everything else. It was such as shitshow that I didn't actually do any real design work the entire time. Most of my day was dedicated to helping a PM with a powerpoint deck to convice the company heads that data governance of health information was a thing, and in fact was very very important.
We had plans on standardizing the products once the merger had taken place, but never had the chance. We had no formal processes in place, and we were working on structuring the team in a way that would make more sense and allow us to implement processes (with me as the director domestically, and a seperate director for the European team) but we were laid off before our proposal was actually due. It became clear early on that all of the equity would go to the venture people (who were clearly wealthy already) and we would just work for them. Our CTO, who was a champion for UX was laid off a few months in when the venture people decided they wanted to pick the executive team. There was a sudden layoff of nearly all domestic engineers, but we were assured that we would not be laid off. Sure enough, a couple months later, the entire US design team was laid off with no warning and a small severence. This happened before we could give them our proposal for our team structure, and working processes, which makes me think they never cared in the first place. I woke up to panicked texts from my stateside coworkers saying they had been axed, and had just enough time to alert my Serbian colleagues to the situation before my access was cut off. They had to hunt me down via my personal email to lay me off later that day. We were laid off right after a bunch of huge companies had big layoffs in january of 2023, and for me personally, right before a big Disney trip we had planned for a year and just gotten the bill for. And this was the second time in my career I was laid off just prior to being promoted. It left me devastated and now in my late 40's with lots of leadership experience but no leadership titles. I joined because I wasn't growing at my previous company, and they left me with very little growth opportunity in a job market where salaries were dropping. I should never have joined them. Now they are Velsera, and by the looks of the reviews, they haven't changed much.
