Review by a current member of the technical Staff - Member Of Technical Staff Index.com Employee Review

You have a lot of responsibility quickly and that makes for a great learning environment. Free breakfast / lunch / dinner Dogs allowed

The hours can be tough

tech driven, strong engineering, strong technical ability from even the juniors engineers.

Business problem: "Amazon Recommendations” - index has data problem + lacks traffic to solve this problem. Data problem: index does not have enough data on the customers to make any meaningful recommendations. For example, if a person buys salad, index might end up recommending a steak and wine because most people that buys steaks buys salad and wine. This end up greatly offending vegetarians and alcoholics because index claims to be good with finding best match/recommendation for user. Lack of traffic: index’s primary and pretty much the only reach to users is via email - through sending receipt via email. Just think about how many useless promotional emails that comes in your spam box each day; index only adds to it. When a user does open the email receipt, they only checks the amount and ignores the rest (especially on mobile where space is limited). Management problems: John loves to code, and Marc loves to get involved with product development. They both love to micro manage and waste the time they could be spending raising series B or looking for clients that actually pays. Index is the most opaque start up I’ve been at: management is unwilling to share information about how much $$ is left in the bank, the burn rate or the revenue. If you just joined index - I recommend looking through the git repository’s history to get a sense of how many engineers have joined and left to gain some insight on how horrible the management is. Misleading interview tactics on attracting talents: Index will probably showcase a line up of ipads that integrates with revel - but the work you will end up doing will certainly not be on the edge.