Pros
There are some excellent professionals working there, who are always ready to help you out. I've witnessed several colleagues still willing to lend you a hand even after a super hard day (which is actually pretty much every day when you work at Lilt) and in a rather toxic environment. This of course doesn't include upper management or sales, which just a couple of exceptions.
Cons
I started working at Lilt and in less than two months after that, I was already looking for another job. I wouldn’t recommend anyone to work for Lilt or to hire Lilt for translation services. That pretty much sums it up. I joined the company hoping to be in touch with the latest in localization and translation technology, but quickly found out behind the scenes that they just made sure to hire good copywriters to produce appealing copy for advertising. I ended up having to deal with multiple spreadsheet trackers for absolutely anything, from project monitoring to invoicing and payment, and having to learn new lingo just because they want to separate themselves from the classic LSPs: Program Managers are actually "Strategists", Sales people are "Account Executives", Project Managers receive the title of "Production Managers" (which is misleading), and they use "Talent" to refer to Vendor Management. Still, the effort of differentiating themselves from the rest doesn't go beyond the new, "fancy" position names, although they do make a difference in how they approach basic processes, resourcing and language quality—but in an outstandingly negative way. One of things they tell you during onboarding is to avoid saying things like "doing X is a best practice in localization", basically because they shut down anyone who comes from the localization industry and would like to contribute with constructive feedback. The CEO himself said "we're not a translation company", but online they state they offer "translation services" so maybe it's time they make up their minds. Most of the features they publicize in their website are quite far from the truth. E.g., their site states that "translators work at superhuman speeds with predictive translation suggestions that get smarter and more accurate over time." In fact, the platform is pretty slow, translators often complain about completely odd bugs, and the translation suggestions they get are raw MT entries that don't take into account the termbase or reviewed translation memory hits. And speaking of TM, they are designed in a way that every time a segment is translated, a TM entry is created. This is for training the engines, but actually ends up generating multiple TM entries of the same segment and, in most cases, with completely different translations, which kills the consistency purpose. As for quality, they claim to have "the industry's most rigorous QA program". Their automatic QA flags a lengthy list of items (most of which are false positives so it makes it hard to find the true ones to fix), doesn't take into account the termbases and doesn't have a spell check. Also, we get constant pressure to remove the editing step and just do translation, even at the early stages of a new program. Their quality scoring framework is very vague, with no possibility of showing the actual weight of each error. A single mistake in 1,000 words isn't a big deal if it's, for example, a missing capital letter or punctuation mark. But if that single mistake is a typo in a product name or a vulgar/offensive term, then we're talking about a critical item. The scoring system they use doesn't detect that, so it doesn't show the true quality. Product updates are implemented without taking into account the people who actually use it. Feedback on critical bugs was shared several times, but they remained unacknowledged until they caused an issue that affected customer deliveries. A complete opposite to a proactive approach. They also set up connectors with CMS or other TMS at the customers’ side without properly testing them beforehand, so very frequently you, as a PM, end up working long hours trying to find out why a delivery never reached the customer’s side, why a project from customer A was sent through a connector to customer B, among many other serious situations that would easily end up in losing a customer entirely. Resourcing is another big problem. "Talent" will give you resources that end up being fake translators who submitted forged CVs. This indicates there's no testing process in place or, if it is, it's frequently skipped. In other cases, they'll give you translators that weren't trained on the platform so you end up having to train them yourself (on top of everything you already have on your plate as PM), or translators who work for a completely different locale. The Sales team ("Account Executives" or AEs) is completely disconnected from reality. Production workloads end up being unmanageable due to Sales reps overpromising to customers. And when it's clear deadlines and requirements won't be met, AEs push Production in shared channels, often with evident passive-aggressiveness and no hesitation in calling PMs out on everything. What’s worse, they keep on hiring Sales and Marketing staff instead of adding more muscle to the Production team, which is completely overwhelmed with work. Speaking of work volumes, we were recently requested in a mass message not to mention we’re “very busy” and complain about working “crazy hours” just because everybody is on the same boat and, if you don’t like it, well, start-ups aren’t for everyone. They keep on using the “we’re a start-up” excuse to disregard claims of excessive workload, many times leading to +60 hour work weeks which aren’t the exception but the rule. The gaslighting is just incredible. As for customers, I was lucky enough not to be assigned to questionable ones Lilt has, such as religious institutions that openly oppose basic human rights issues, the LGBTQ+ community, etc. Pretty problematic when they're listed here as an "equal opportunity employer" that fosters “diversity and inclusion”. Last but not least, the CEO is the least down-to-earth person ever. His total lack of consideration about the team is evident, without a single second of time invested to at least learn their names. There are people who found out they would be out of their jobs after watching a "weekly updates from the CEO" video he shared with the company where he said they would be reducing certain teams. A member of the team received an email from an HR rep stating that, as of a given date, their working hours would "be reduced to zero", a rather ill-chosen way to inform someone they're terminated from their job. After firing the fifth? executive in a short period of time, the CEO set about organizing Production himself with absolutely no clue about it. All Production members now report to a single manager who, in spite of being a knowledgeable and capable employee, is clearly set up for failure as it's just too much work for one person. The role of Program Managers ("Strategists") is unclear, as PMs no longer report to them and the AEs took most of the customer-facing stuff (with zero knowledge of localization and the tendency to overpromise already mentioned.)
