Not a nice play to work any longer. No wonder they have so much churn lately!
Pros
Job without much pressure, and frankly low expectations!
Cons
The pro is the cons too, if you are ambitious enough, and are willing to step outside your comfort zone, and learn new things. The product is fairly basic, and there doesn't seem to be an interest in actually building a sophisticated ML product. The pivot towards point and click configuration to make the product pass as a SAAS seems like a major self goal to me! There has been a serious attrition where a lot of tenured people have either left or are in the process of leaving, which probably is largely because of 1. Very poor management decisions made in hiring and promotion. 2. The benefits and comp are nowhere close to standard tech comp/benefits. Missing 401K match, no maternity/2 week bonding leave, average insurance, no equity (post acquisition). Tuesday Tacos and Beer Fridays aren't real benefits! 3. Science is pretty basic so data scientists can get bored/disillusioned pretty quickly. The day to day tech stack is really dated and will probably set you back by a decade (imagine no version control/git in 2020s). Engagement managers use emails and one note and excel workbook for project management / documentation. Data Architects/Data Engineers do not use MLOPS tools, and largely write basic sql statements. If someone stays long enough, they might feel too dated to make the next move! 4. With lot of tenured people leaving, the doers feel the squeeze - the pressure of doing, and the blame in the face of things not going as expected. If you are buddies with right people, it’s easy to talk, collect paycheck, and fly under the radar while not doing much! 5. Abject lack of diversity and near absence of women in leadership roles - only marketing has women leaders. And the way things are going, I won't be surprised if the services org doesn't have any women in the very near future. Engineering already doesn’t have any. Two women is CSM org left citing nonexistent maternity benefit, and management seems happy about CSM org being a frat house. Poor Communication from management: people including managers left, and there wasn’t much communication to coworkers and clients about that until after the person was gone. Hiring is not only done when there is too much growth, but also when there is too much attrition. Wink Wink. HR doesn't mean just payroll and admin work. Missing HR supervision across groups means a lot of unprofessional behavior, and real issues like gender pay gap, poor pay parity across ethnic groups, and potentially EEO discriminations could fly under the radar. People worked their tails off when COVID hit, and everything was fine and everyone sang the Adult Culture song. Now there is a pressure from exec team / managers to ensure partial office presence, because presumably people aren’t being adults and interviewing while working from home ;)
