Pros
Prefacing this review with: It seems like a lot of these reviews are either 1* or 5*. Let's be realistic everyone, Lightning Bolt is not the best of the best and cannot compete with other 5* places like Google. But it is also a cool place to learn & work and by no means is a 1* company. Attempting to be as unbiased as possible, as a lot of these reviews are either mad ex-employees OR current employees whose job is to make LB look enticing (you can tell who these two groups are if you've worked here...) -Bright coworkers. Warm, friendly environment. Very easy to get along with (most of) your coworkers. -Work from home Tuesdays & Thursdays -Flexible WFH, if wanting to take "half-breaks" maybe working from your hometown, etc. -Snacks available in the office (chips, drinks, fruit, etc. Small lunch items available to make an OK lunch. Catered lunches about 1-2 times per month. -Software idea is cool and is probably the best for the specific/niche market that LB is in -Old management is being cycled out. For good or for worse, that's up to the individual. Personally, I think new management will be much better for growth in the long term -Promotions/raises are looking quite good recently (past 6 months) as a point to combat other people's reviews saying low raises/promotions. BUT maybe this is only due to the employee turnover all at once -Extremely easy to give feedback to seniors/leads/management and you will almost always get immediate changes if it's truly a good change -Opportunities to work on side projects of interest: client facing, internal facing, sales, etc.
Cons
-TOTAL compensation is alright. Kinda low for the Bay Area in a tech-focused skill role. Salary is comparable, but no bonuses/equity (almost worthless) -Consultant work is very, very support focused. Technical aspect >>>>> Support aspect in terms of intelligence, but you spend time doing about 35/65 (possible pro, if you really enjoy client success focused work) -Work, in my opinion, doesn't feel rewarding. Seems like your job is to literally just prevent fires (make sure clients don't cancel/keep them happy) -Growth paths can be kind of arbitrary depending on what the company needs, unclear if a position for what you want will be available AND THIS ONE. -The software...Conceptually, it's a great idea but the execution of the UI & back end codebase is SO poor. -I'm pretty sure the UI won't be even half updated until 2019-2020, at which time half of those features will probably be defunct. What is the UI/UX guy actually working on? Everyone's unsure -85% of your job as a Consultant ends up having to help clients because 1) UI is so god awful that it's too confusing for clients to do work on their own or 2) bugs, bugs, bugs everywhere-- which have an insane life cycle before they get fixed. Causes unintended, confusing results that you spend hours troubleshooting, only to realize it was a bug
