Pros
There were complex problems to solve, and people were given opportunities to take on features. The product was interesting. The managers were genuinely helpful and checked in often. The biggest pro is the people I met in this job — amazing, talented, lovely people who I have become friends with and stayed in touch with. The atmosphere of the team was always positive and supportive. We also had fun socials. The pay was good.
Cons
I got made redundant less than a year into the job, along with many others in the same situation. This was also ONE WEEK before what would have been our first company offsite. They also emailed us at 7PM (out of office hours) to tell us not to come into the office the following day, as we would then find out if we'd been made redundant... Apparently they couldn't have waited for a work-from-home day to tell us straight; instead they caused most of us an anxiety-filled night. The codebase was an absolute nightmare. Working on it made simple features so much more complicated, as you had to figure out how not to make the whole thing crumble... I cannot stress the AMOUNT of code I had to filter through, over and over, to make sense of it. Makes me nauseous thinking about it. The CEO and CTO had no idea how to lead a company. The direction was changing constantly. They would want to build something but had no idea if it was going to sell. We would build it, and tada, they'd find out it wasn't going to sell, so in the bin it went! There was an enormous push to use AI as much as possible; every meeting seemed to be AI-related in some way, and it was suffocating. They were constantly asking for speed but forgetting about quality. The days were 9 to 6, three days a week in the office.
