Terminus Reviews

* interview was a breeze, actually too easy which makes for some questionable hires * total brodeo, many who work there act like they are part of a fraternity at times .. this is mostly in sales and marketing * weird cult like chants said at every lunch * tech stack is totally crap with questionable choices spread through every turn -- any suggestion to make this better is met by push back from old heads who think they know everything (they don't) * some seniors have massive egos * "planning" is a joke, no real deep dive into the issues just a surface conversation * no meetings on architecture concerns * deployment architecture and strategy is hot garbage * issue tracking is god awful * boring problems to solve * healthcare is pretty average, salary sort of makes up for it

The most important lesson I learned at Terminus, though, is the tremendous opportunity cost that comes with organizations like this. Like many of its competitors, the actual capacity of its products to produce outcomes is extremely difficult to ascertain. But more importantly, I believe that this capacity is not a large factor in the final balance of what Terminus gives to the world. The most significant impact of this organization is that it competes in a constrained technical labor market, and it uses its PE-backed resources to consume talent that could be doing something of substance. Perhaps a close second would be its outsized layoffs at the start of COVID, justified by a misrepresentation of the company's finances, and not balanced by any cut in executive compensation. After that would be its total failure to seriously grapple with its diversity issue. I saw many department and executive leaders hiring their white friends into key positions why the company talked about diversity. I never saw any communication at Terminus that appeared to acknowledge the reality of any trade-offs between diversity and the company's bottom line, so it's unsurprising that Terminus never really traded anything off for it, never really made a move that made anyone uncomfortable. The most important thing I learned by leaving Terminus is that there are many organizations that employ people with technical talent and are conscientious and holistic in their understanding of the market and their place in it. That is to say, organizations that would ask questions like "while we strive to produce a tool that helps young people of color learn to code, are we also making it harder for those young people to find work by letting our white managers employ their talented white friends?" Except when hiring practices might expose them to litigation, which is extremely rare, a question like this is unintelligible to an organization like Terminus. The second most important thing I learned by leaving Terminus is that folks who try to start these conscientious organizations fail chiefly because of the limited supply of technical talent and because of the ability of organizations like Terminus to out-bid them on the labor market. The efficiency with which these organizations take valuable talent and put it on the shelf for years at a time is deeply upsetting to me, and I've come to view much of the decay of our public infrastructure as the opportunity cost of choosing to back institutions like this one. I hope that more folks will come to this point of view, and particularly, I hope that one or more folks reading this will reconsider both the type of organization they plan to interview with and the salary target they have in mind for their next position, with this in mind.