Pros
When I was present, Apploi had a well run, extremely talented product team, focused on career development for all team members and working with research more strongly than the majority of all startups. The product we were creating was one to be proud of. Definitely an environment where if you saw something you wanted to get done, you could start in on it and make a difference directly, almost at the risk of prototypes becoming production-level applications. It was empowering and took away from limits of job titles, etc. The majority of people were focused on delivering a mission that wasn't your average tech startup. Teams really engage directly with users to better their lives. This is one-in-a-million.
Cons
Severe lack of transparency, bordering on unethical. Analytics were faked. Fake reviews were posted. Backdoors were used to avoid accountability for actions that had known negative impact on the company, which further skewed analytics. Estimates for impact of features were sometimes off by a factor of ten or more. Tech management decisions were at times brutal and reflected a disinterest in the wellbeing of the employees, including deployments on Fridays / late evenings resulting in employees working 18-20+ hour shifts, and employees not involved in these being guilted for not participating more. At one point, employee roles were shifted (or threatened to shift) dramatically at times (up to weekly...) based off the current concerns, without worrying about time or energy lost from juggling many code bases and having to learn additional languages. Because of the codebase and 0% test coverage, it was virtually impossible to develop any new feature without fear of bringing all systems down. Management outside of tech vetoed efforts needed for rewrites / test coverage for nearly a year. Senior management lacked a great deal of experience, and it was very difficult to get past their first impressions, even when first impressions might not be tied to any reliable analytics or data. People were frightened enough by the prospect of giving negative feedback or analytics that the data was skewed, which lead partially to the realization that company burn down was inescapably too high, and lead to the layoffs of nearly 2/3 the company. Diversity was a problem. While there were diverse employees, all engineers were white men beyond the CTO. Pay for white male colleagues was industry standard; pay for women of color working alongside design and engineering was half the industry standard. For a company interested in empowering minorities, this was frightening. Discussion of salary by current employees was a fireable offense according to the company handbook (despite this likely being illegal). On smaller diversity related notes, rewards were often revolving around alcohol, despite multiple engineers or employees being sober. Generous vacation policy, but difficult to get approved to take off the time you were promised.
