For All Departments:
1. You are hired as an consultant not as an employee. It gives certain tax benefits but limits other benefits and risk protection that a company employee gets. If you fall sick for over a week, that will be mentioned in your reviews and hurt your prospects.
2. Too much hierarchy for a startup. When I left, there were 6 managers managing 8 employees. Most of managerial team are friends and family. So, space for an employee to grow is limited.
3. Budget for salaries of Indian teams is maintained low.
4. Not so good legacy code that tech founders are resistant to give up on. Significant dev time is spent on fixing bugs.
5. Company seems to be earning well but the product does not have scale in terms of daily transactions. You will experience technologies in width, not depth. Not good for backend developer profiles.
For Non-Tech Departments (HR, Operations, Clinical, Sales)
1. Micro management and work overhead on certain department employees. You have to mention same task on trello, slack and email. Demand for maintaining multiple records with redundant information.
2. Not trusting employees.
3. Passive aggression and occasional subtle elitism.
4. Too much interdepartmental interference.
5. Unclear processes.