Pros
The people. Genuinely, there are some incredibly talented people in there and I can honestly say I've learnt from some of the best in the industry. I've also made real friends, although a lot of that bonding came from shared trauma over pints after work. Free lunch on Thursdays was also a nice touch.
Cons
I don't even know where to start but the thing that really pushed me and a lot of others over the edge was leadership's blind obsession with AI. So much so it literally became one of the core values. Never mind the real teething issues that needed fixing for loyal tradespeople and consumers, leadership was too busy shoving AI down everyone's throat whether it made sense or not. A flashy slide at All Hands, enough buzzwords to get the AI obsessed people nodding, and that passed for a strategy. Everything got done quickly and badly, just because someone in Leadership had a crack at it on Claude or Loveable and said it could be done. Every Google Doc you opened was riddled with AI slop, feedback clearly came from ChatGPT, and the people who'd been there a while watched the product get enshittified in real time. Then the goalposts never stopped moving. Now, to a point that's normal for a company trying to scale, I get it. But the rhythm here was just too much. Strategy changes and restructures were happening way too often. I watched heads of channels, teammates, engineers and product owners get humiliated by leadership. The lack of trust towards marketing teams was flagrant and honestly quite disrespectful. It didn't matter that we were doing a good job, in their eyes we were simply never doing enough. That gets to you after a while. A lot of us lost our confidence and any real drive to give anything to that company. (And this wasn't just new people, this happened to people who'd been there for years and were genuinely trying to stay loyal.) If your work was thorough and built for long-term impact, it got ignored. Because it wasn't easy to quantify straight away. The stuff that actually moved the needle in a meaningful way never got recognised because it didn't make for a clean slide. Only the quick wins mattered, even if they didn't really mean anything. Week after week you'd hear about someone off sick with burnout (myself included) or someone getting let go. And rather than do something about it, they'd reward working out of hours. People who stayed late got shout-outs at all-hands. The CEO joked in his Christmas party speech that Checkatrade needed everything done "yesterday." Someone printed it on a t-shirt and gave it to him for banter. The final straw for me was when a third-party agency was brought in to audit my channel. My teammates and manager wasted time and money having to disprove dangerous recommendations from AI bros who knew absolutely nothing about the trades industry or the channel they were supposed to be auditing. It was demoralising. So if you think you can handle AI hype, no substance, zero trust and lack of competence from leadership, go for it. But say goodbye to your sanity on the way in.