Pros
- Career progression can be good due to battlefield promotions, because of high staff turnover at senior levels and difficulty hiring into those positions. - Some good ideas about fast iteration and testing and incremental delivery.
Cons
- Massive turnover of product and engineering leaders (8 left or fired in a 9 month period), due to CEO being hard to work with and micromanaging these areas. Questions from him include : "Why is this 1 point ticket not a half point ticket", "Why do we need React when front end is just javascript and templating" and "Why did engineer X take 4 hours to complete this 2 hour task" - CEO doesn't have the communications, people or strategy skills needed to scale a business. He's great as an early stage entrepeneur, but prefers doing things himself to delegating, strategy, and inspiring. - Tech stack is 2 monoliths consisting of a tarball of Hibernate entities glued together with legacy Java, with a bunch of different legacy front end techs on the top. - Main business (80%?) is in selling Viagra and similar meds. Very exposed to being undercut. - Not funded externally. While they see this as a strength, it means they find it hard to compete with better funded competitors, and while they want to get external funding, this will be hard in the current economy and without a unique enough proposition. - Pivoting, micromanagement and capricious direction changes can be stressful, esp if in product/engineering.
