Questionable ethics, hard drugs in the office, poor treatment of contractors
Pros
Small company with an interesting mission.
Cons
If you're considering joining Lugg as a software engineer, I'd recommend you keep looking. Here is why: * Equity issues: the employee equity is out of whack -- they have 10% allocated for employee equity when it should be 20%. * Team technical experience: the CTO (lead engineer) is out of his depth. They were disappointed with some of the work I did because they chose to take work written for one use case and then turn around and use it for a different one without asking my opinion on it. Then when that failed, the fault was mine not those that made the decision to do something stupid. The lead engineer was one of the people making this bad decision. The bigger problem is a lack of understanding of how to work with other engineers. During the interview, there was no warning of how he worked which is very incremental with a lot of debugging in production. To non-developers, this can look like someone saving the day regularly however to developers, it's obvious that this is someone solving problems they are creating. * Culture: I personally witnessed hard drug use in the office after hours. I was uncomfortable with this. Supposedly, it was more than just the one individual involved. * Poor management: I was let go on the last day of the month without warning. In hindsight, it was obvious they hired another developer and weren't planning on keeping me on. But they didn't let me know so I could arrange for health insurance for my family. They don't care about you at all. * Contractors: The employees doing the actual physical work of moving things are not treated as true contractors. They are often treated with the expectation of being like employees but without any of the benefits of being employees. This matters to you because it impacts how successful the company is going to be in the long term. There are a lot of competitors. * Poor work-life balance: It is an unstated rule that you're supposed to work on Saturdays. This is atypical of most startups. If you value your personal time, remember you're working 6 days a week here not 5 so factor that into the compensation evaluation -- there are tons of other great opportunities at the same or better pay with better work-life balance. I was planning on leaving anyway after seeing how the team worked and witnessing the hard drug use. But I do worry about others getting caught up with this team and would encourage being very careful.
