Pros
Background/disclosure: I worked at Comgy for just over a year as the Lead Quality Engineer and Scrum Master for the development team. Overall it was an excellent experience and I am still on good terms with both management and the company, and this remains to be true despite the fact that we came to a mutual agreement that it would be best for both the company and myself to part ways. I have over 5 years experience in software development and startups. Pros: - C-levels have diverse backgrounds and skill sets and they are each experts in their respective fields (bizdev, finance/investment, technology, and operations). This is not just another "me and my 2 MBA buddies" firm - Comgy is actually doing something good for the planet: the end goal is to automate heat cost bill generation and empower people by giving them real time energy consumption monitoring, which helps save energy (and water!) - Beautiful office situated in trendy trendy Kreuzberg - 1 week bonus Education Leave: get a week to go study a course or learn something new and share it with the team - Interesting tech stack that involves radio, MQTT, data decryption/normalization, ruby on rails, gateway firmware, and device installation/management - Development team that actually practices Agile (in particular, Scrumban) - Working with talented engineers and like minded people - Free coffee and soft drinks, Friday half-day/work beers, office cereal and fruit baskets - Competitive compensation/salary - Recently closed a solid/strong investment round - Regular 360 feedback rounds and one-on-one meetings and fortnightly retrospectives - High quality products and releases (we had only 1 rollback in an entire year)
Cons
Cons: - occasional lack of alignment from C-levels/department heads felt by whole team (this was admittedly getting a lot better just before I left) - lack of process definition, especially within operations - tech team works in German/English which is totally fine, but German skills we're not listed as a requirement for the job. Code is of course in English, comms with our Polish engineers and in Slack chats are mostly in English, but you will miss a lot of information in day to day office and department interactions without a solid grasp of German - lack of trust and transparency for some decisions (finances/department budgets are not shared, some members hired without having formal interviews or when they were vetoed by HR) Summary: Comgy, like all startups, has gone through some inevitable growing pains. Despite being a dedicated company filled with interesting people there were a couple pain points which continued to come up, but nothing that felt unsolvable. What I can say is that management are genuinely and authentically engaged in tackling these issues and are very happy to receive direct feedback (once they find the time). It did not feel like these issues where static or invisible, since they were raised in the company all hands meeting by management as well. I would still recommend Comgy as a place to work, especially if you care about working on meaningful products and want to be part of a great team.