Pros
- Relaxed workload – easily 10–15 h/week of real work if you master the art of looking busy on Teams. - Some truly brilliant niche engineers. If you have a Master’s or PhD in robotics (or related fields) and dream of working surrounded by genuinely talented people while the company pays the bills, this place is basically paradise. - Interesting core technology with untapped potential – shame about the organisational tar pit surrounding it. - Fully remote for most roles.
Cons
- Runs like a richly funded public-research institute that accidentally discovered VC money: zero urgency, zero grasp of opportunity cost. - Boasts a “flat hierarchy” yet somehow manages to have C-level → Vice Presidents (new, expensive add) → Heads → Leads → Managers → Coordinators (another recent gem) → “Senior” – one middle-manager for every three ICs. Real talk: the company would instantly run faster, cheaper, and happier with half the headcount and one actual manager per 20 people. - 1:1s and performance reviews exist solely to stockpile quotes for the next layoff ceremony. No promotions, no bonuses, no KPIs, no career path – just ritualised bureaucracy. - Hiring sprees the moment a new funding tranche lands, followed by chaotic layoffs three months later because “strategy changed”. Middle management, of course, is bulletproof – their main KPI is producing passive-aggressive emails to justify their own existence. - Travel policy worthy of Ryanair on a bad day: per-diem so pathetic you lose money if you eat normally, while at least 50 % of the trips have no identifiable business purpose whatsoever. - Permanent fear culture – nobody takes risks, nobody speaks up, meetings are elaborate exercises in collective ass-covering. - Mandatory LinkedIn propaganda duty: employees are regularly strong-armed into copy-pasting identical, ChatGPT-written corporate love letters and cringeworthy sales buzzword salads on their personal accounts. Refuse too often and you’re suddenly “non-aligned with company values”.