Pros
I'm really enjoying working at HealthMatch, because it's so rare to find the right combination of having a positive mission and being successful too. I've worked at places that really stretched the definition of "changing the world" and made me cynical but were very successful, and at some places that were doing something good but were falling apart as a company. This place really feels like the goldilocks startup! Pros list: * Helping with clinical trials feels like a good mission * Nice feeling of success, with good media coverage and support from investors and strong growth * Team is all really nice and we have fun chatting. Every friday we play games after the all-hands; we've had Eurovision-themed bingo, tiktok dance showdown, geogessur, a scavenger hunt, etc.! Because everyone is so friendly and accommodating, this is low stress even for a semi-antisocial engineer like me. * I'm paid pretty well 🤷♂️ especially for a startup... Most startups are like "here's your burlap sack and a lottery ticket", and I guess from the negative review here that it was like that in the early days here as well, but not now. * The CEO is willing to listen to engineering. I don't think I've ever been taken out to lunch for _finishing a refactoring_ before!
Cons
In some ways my lack of emotion at my previous big-corp FAANG jobs was comfortably numb, and it was nice to be able to zone out or not care. While so far I've not had to do any crunch time, this job does demand my actual concentration and care. I can't just assign myself the next bug in the tracker and have at it, I need to think. It's likely that for most devs this would be a pro 😅 Not any/many junior engineers yet. "Juniors grow by learning, seniors grow by mentoring", so I'd actually like a junior or two.