Pros
> Solid team culture. I was in the CloudMagic team for about a year and a half. This was possibly one of the only "Global consumer facing product by an Indian startup" back then. And it showed. Being in the devOps team, we had complete ownership of the infra-- that also meant that a 9-5 culture was off the map. This when resulted into lesser sleep- fostered automation like nothing else. I was handling log aggregation and metrics of the entire infrastructure there. Having that kind of a visibility-- I did not come across a single outage that wasn't post-mortem-ed. > Up front approach to problem solving. My team lead there was the most visionary and pragmatic programmer i came across. To support this with facts- the time we started using "common devOps tools of today", they weren't common-- we were using Graphite, statsd in almost the same timeline as firefox was using them. (To make sure this doesn't sound fake- back when i left, i had the highest number, (even if not quality) of answers under the graphite tag under StackOverflow). Note that this wasn't a huge Amazon or Flipkart with kind of unlimited resources but a five dev infra team shipping weekly. Total credit to the team lead i had. Can't tell about other teams, but my general outlook was that they were solid. > Data driven Everything. Everyone, from the caterer to the CEO there had to justify, or at-least back decisions up with data. We used to have the ten minute maintenance downtimes between popular FIFA matches, or Sundays. We had a QoS system that accounted for *every* slow mail crawled across what were 9 crawlers back then. You couldn't just throw more servers into a cluster to "horizontally scale" it up, until someone verified the bottlenecks on one of them. Small things like this made the team very data driven. And not just tech-- marketing, sales, app-crashes, you name it. > Transparency. Each employee used to know how much money the company made on a day to day basic. We had an automated mail doing this. There was no mgmt@cloudmagic. The devs were the first testers. A very flat meritocracy based organization wherein you can confront anyone in the team with data. I was surprised the day the CEO sent an article to the entire team titled "Stock options: explained for engineers", which told us of the common loopholes B-grade companies set up to make bronze look like gold. > Everyone answered tickets. Most of them were directly done by the CEO. And this was back when we had i think more than a miillion and a half users. There was no "you're support--you answer tickets" culture. Believe me or not, this made us better programmers. Overall, biased as it may be-- I honestly don't think I could've gotten a better experience as a fresher anywhere. Google would've made me a better techie perhaps with their 50K server datacenters at my disposal(?), but without the team there i wouldn't have been a tenth of a team lead, or the pragmatic programmer that i am today. If you want to have a startup someday, consider this close to YC at-least in the product-development and technical side of things.
Cons
> Meritocracy hurts when you're not the best. You don't get to choose the best problems just because it's your turn. Unless you up your game, you won't get greater responsibilities. This may be a "con" for some, but sure is fun. Same with the work timings. If you want a Bank Job, this isn't the place for you. > Too much focus on loyalty by the CEO. While this is a great thing in itself, it should be a pure competence based tech company, not the Godfather. There were X and Y handling very important parts of our infra and they stuck around at roles involving serious tech backends which many of us felt they weren't good-enough at the scale that we were at. This took too long to change. This was a one-off incident, but. > Too fast for it's own good sometimes. Had I had more time to step back and think-- i'd have shipped better code. We still were at at an inferior deployment mechanism while even IRCTC had perhaps shifted to Chef/Puppet/Salt. Deploying was such a pain. I think this is an obvious side effect of shipping fast, so take this with your fist of salt. > Salary isn't industry's best even by Bangalore standards. Stocks weren't as competitive as the market. At-least back then. I left a year back. Things might've changed. Pinch of salt. > Badly stocked pantry. Who wants Parle-G and 50-50 man? > While some did, i heard people in the QA/testing team not sure if they would be upgraded to a dev role, did they show the competence. This kills morale at that end a bit.