A house of cards with the Dead Sea effect in full force
Pros
If you want to work for a company that you can get away with doing fairly little work and spend your time developing yourself outside of what Optimizely offers, you may have that chance. Work life balance is good, which can be useful for dealing with personal admin Private health cover is useful and Pensions match is 1% above standard
Cons
First note: Take the time to read the 'positive' reviews of engineering here and see that they are from Bangladesh. Optimizely is in the process of moving much of the support of their tech to 'cheaper' locations, with very little regard for how feasible this even is, given the state of the engineering. Optimizely presents itself as a 'Silicon Valley' style scale up, with exciting statistics and tech, that are well polished. In reality it is a random collection of acquired companies owned by an investment firm that has no sense of how to build or grow the products or technology, instead trying to artificially inflate it's value in the hopes of an exit event. Engineering has been in a relatively rapid state of decline for years. Each acquisition comes with no plan or process for onboarding engineers or the tech stack, leading to huge numbers of engineers leaving and in turn leaving behind legacy, unstable tech, to over-loaded teams who have no idea how to maintain or support them. There are pervasive silos and a real lack of understanding of ownership of projects, meaning years after acquisitions the best engineers can do is try to fix bugs when they happen. I know of multiple products where there are serious question marks over whether they work and whether the numbers they return are not in fact false, but Optimizely lacks the in-house know how and time to properly investigate. There is no appetite from the C-suite to grow or develop the tech or products offered. This means there is no product direction and therefore new features or engineering have no real support. There have been no substantial or truly impactful deployments in years, instead frontends get redesigned in the hope customers fall for the pretty branding. Instead of investing in the teams, tech and talent already at Optimizely, Optimizely would rather spend hundreds of millions on more failed acquisitions, with no plan on how to merge the tech they buy. Middle management appears to be a war zone of team leads with no interest in bringing value, instead all vying for money or resources. The reality is hiring is very difficult, good engineers quickly see the state and leave. New hires are sometimes offered good pay but typically pay is low and pay rises/bonuses etc are non-existent. The culture verges on hostile towards engineers, when compared with the culture that other teams experience or the cultures that the startups Optimizely buy used to have. Engineering is rarely, if ever mentioned at all hands instead it is clear the company revolves around the sales team. Shortly after; pay freezes, incredibly difficult merges, a lack of back filling and covid, the CEO decided to do a send-all email containing a video of himself and the sales team drinking cocktails on a beach, in Hawaii, with the phrase: "If you work hard you could be here too"
