Pros
- Genuinely smart and well-meaning colleagues across most teams - The problem space is interesting — veterinary software matters - Remote-friendly culture
Cons
- Massive, unaddressed technical debt. Core systems carry years of accumulated shortcuts that nobody is empowered — or incentivized — to fix. New features get bolted onto a rotting foundation, and leadership treats this as the cost of doing business rather than an existential risk - Feature factory mentality. Velocity is measured in tickets closed, not outcomes delivered. Shipping something is treated as the finish line, regardless of whether it actually works or solves the customer's problem - Incomplete features shipped as done. It's common for work to land in production well before it's ready. "Coming soon" pages go live with nothing behind them. Customers notice. Support then denies reported bugs rather than acknowledging known gaps — which erodes trust externally and internally. - Shortsighted decision-making. There's a persistent pattern of optimizing for the next sprint at the expense of the next year. Problems that get raised get deferred until they become crises, then get patched instead of solved - Individual contributors don't move the needle. No matter how sharp you are, the organizational structure and culture make it nearly impossible to drive meaningful change from the IC level. Good ideas go into a void. The best engineers eventually stop trying. - "Not my problem" culture. Ownership is diffuse to the point of dysfunction. Work falls through the cracks between teams with no one accountable for the seams. This isn't malicious — it's a structural failure that's never been corrected. - Shooting themselves in the foot, repeatedly. There's a pattern of decisions that actively undermine customer confidence and internal morale — and yet the same patterns recur. Post-mortems happen; behavior doesn't change. - Accountability is essentially optional. Deadlines slip, commitments get quietly dropped, and the consequences are rarely visible. There's no apparent mechanism for holding teams — or individuals — to a standard. Over time this creates a culture where doing the minimum is normalized and high performers either leave or level down.