Pros
- The office's ocean view is gorgeous. - Good ENG teammates
Cons
Where do I even begin? As other comments have pointed out, there has been a lot of laid offs. They never back-filled any headcount so the remaining overworked engs will just keep on overworking. The internal morale of this company could not be any lower, since the recent round of layoff had triggered a bunch of other engineers to voluntarily leave. This is a Series B company but does not operate like one. There is a lack of transparency from the leadership and decisive priority for the direction of the company. There are like ten different 1st priority at the same time, and when there is not a strong sign of progress the CEO will bring in "additional help" via contracting that mostly end up delivering half-baked solutions leaving the full-time-employees to pick up the slack. Also, there has been a lot of dead projects over the years because of bad decisions from the leadership. At this point I don't even know why has not the board ousted the CEO. Also, to make matters worse, the CEO is also the CTO. So there is no opposing voice when the CEO proposes something absurd technical-wise. There is no good benefits: no 401k match (expected for a startup), no more once in a week free lunch, no nothing. The best they can do is a pizza party capping at 2 slices of pizza per person. And yes, as other comments have pointed out: the CEO is racist. When they do deployment, do not expect individual hotel rooms. They have arranged Deployed Engineers to jam into one Airbnb rental because that will save the company money. So expect to see your colleagues face more than 8 hours a day. Now that cash is shorter they probably would jam few people into one room, so be ready to smell your colleagues' fart/feet. Finally, leadership is arrogant enough to think that they could run this company purely on LLMs to fill the gap of missing engineering headcounts; just blindly following the trend of big-tech C-Suites but the difference is that big tech have tens of thousands of Engs to put out fires, but in this place you have more middle managers than Engs. Tech debt is pilling up faster than they could clear them. I feel bad for myself and other ICs that we have put in so much extra time and effort and the reward is more work and sacrifices.
