Pros
I loved my time at SOLO. Making tech for the solar industry introduces a lot of fun and complex problems to work on. The culture was fantastic, and it was easy to make lot's of friends, even being in management. Dan Larkin, the CEO, is a good leader and good human. He cares deeply about people, and it shows in the way he interacts with everyone. The product and development teams both progressed from infancy to mature-ish teams in the time I was there, and it was fun to see SOLO grow.
Cons
Despite the following issues, I still had a blast working here, and would recommend SOLO to anyone. The early development team was almost entirely junior engineers hired from local bootcamps, and the codebase shows that. When I started there was an insane amount of tech debt for a 4 year old company. That, and the development environment was always unnecessarily complicated and hard to work in, so development progress was slow. The product team lacked a vision, and as a result, we built just about everything that every client asked for, resulting in a lot of product bloat, and thousands of company specific feature flags. Constant changes in priorities and interruptions made it hard for my development teams to complete a project. Many times product would side-step development leadership and ask developers 1:1 to work on features that were not part of the teams' roadmap. Despite these conditions, my teams were always expected to get things built far faster than what's feasible. We were always under a ton of pressure for my entire two years there. Despite mine and my product-counterparts communication of reasonable timelines for releases, our input was often not taken into account, and unreasonable deadlines would be set for our teams anyways.
