Pros
My team were genuinely some of the loveliest people I’ve ever worked with. There were many issues at Vortexa, and this stoked a feeling that we were all in the trenches together. You would be well supported by others, and they’d have a lot of sympathy for the issues you’d be facing (as they had faced them too). Very interesting product, with very interesting problems to solve. There are deep issues with the tech stack. However the over complicated nature does push you to learn a lot of tech. This is fairly backhanded, but the high number of issues means you have a lot of choice to work on the problems that interest you.
Cons
Vortexa has a lot of problems and is struggling to face them. Clients churn due to platform instability. They have sales fail due to poor prioritisation. Their infrastructure costs are extremely high, and they did little to bring it down. On multiple occasions their Infrastructure team lost $10,000s due to mistakes that went unseen. Engineers have been left out of pocket for periods of time. Organisation is poor, and development is slow. Teams do not give regular updates to management. Teams get blocked, and it takes months to be resolved. Type 2 decisions (ones that can be reversed) are debated for months (even years). Teams are discouraged from co-ordinating together. Regular retros are discouraged by the CTO. It is common for features to take years to ship. The CTO is out of his depth. People were frustrated and he gave no leadership or guidance. He had no plan to address the above. He defaults to authoritarian and insulting behaviour. He calls people out negatively in quarterly catchups in front of others. I saw him insult engineers in private. He will ‘order you’ (his words) on Slack. Most people do not respect him, with engineers sharing memes and rants behind his back. I had at times privately tell people to rein that in, however their frustrations were fair. He struggles to listen to issues without taking it personally. Thankfully you rarely see him. Multiple people have left due to the poor organisation, unwillingness to take on issues, and the CTO’s poor skills and behaviour.
