Pros
Mission is solid, general product was great. Good benefits, time off, and bonuses/gifts. Most of my coworkers were great people and very fun to be around. Honestly miss it a bit. Surprisingly, I personally never had an issue with HR. It was also nice to work for a company that builds technical tools. Way refreshing if you're used to building more social oriented products where software complexity is minimal and the people who drive the company are non-technical.
Cons
Lots of technical debt. When I was there a huge push was organized to fix it, but the project was unfortunately not very well managed or scoped and managed to only refactor a small portion of the technical debt. The larger, more important piece of the puzzle was consistently shrugged off by management until it caused a few very painful circumstances that pinched the company hard enough we were forced to work on it. Constant redirection from leadership. It was very hard to even focus on one part of the platform at any given time. This is pretty normal in startups, sure, but it was often uncomfortable because in a few instances we nearly missed deadlines because leadership just didn't care about it. Insane amounts of micromanagement from the CEO. To get anything on board with the CEO, he would feel the need to be completely redefine it in his vision before he'd approve it, often adding unnecessary work just so he could feel like he contributed in some way. Most of the staff simply avoiding discussing projects with him until it was inevitable. CEO also is generally rude to his staff. Not the worst I've seen, actually, but I can say for sure I left because of him. If you don't have to work directly with him it's not a bad company but it just became too much at some point. He has good values, I'll give him that, but sometimes with the way he acts it feels entirely disingenuous. CTO is better, generally speaking I did like working with him, but I saw him pick on people a few times when a professional response was warranted and it was very uncomfortable. He was nice to me though, still I didn't appreciate seeing him treat people the way he did. Plenty of unfulfilled promises. Our holiday party before COVID the CEO gave a big speech about treating the company like a family, typical of delusional tech start ups, but the type of team building events or activities that would have been useful to this end were never organized. On top of that, the CEO promised nothing would change after COVID because our income stream was good and within days laid a bunch of people off because, apparently, we didn't have enough money after all. Culture of clashing/fighting (thanks to the CEO who wants to nitpick just about everything.) Just hope you never get called into a room so he can spend hours trying to make you understand something from his perspective. Often times he'd overthink issues and would force you to agree with him, not letting you leave until you did. Some of the team had advised me to just "manage" him by working around this quirk of his. Ultimately I just found his behavior abusive and left. Other people always felt the need to get into arguments all of the time because of this. Leadership needs to remember that the tone gets set from the top and trickles down. This isn't the company I thought it was going to be and that made it hard to leave at first, but I was very happy to do so. If you're thinking about joining this company, I sure do hope it has changed.
