Pros
- Talented pool of engineers and designers who genuinely care about building something that delights and works - An equally technically minded and creative CS team as the Engineers (some CS folks are better Engineers) - Fast-paced environment that teaches you how to operate in ambiguity (for better or worse) - Lots of opportunities given for people to move around departments which is nice to see - Some of the best intern hires I’ve ever seen in a company - CEO is transparent with financials and a great communicator - Cool office and convenient location - Me days are a good concept - The IT guy is pretty cool (he brings a lot of positive energy and games to the office)
Kontras
- The company has gone through major highs and lows, but the decline since the Product reorganisation has been really hard to ignore. - Engineering leadership is a complete and utter joke; they don’t lead, they firefight (or claiming other Engineers’ ideas as their own). - Product direction “pivots” weekly, driven by personal whims and optics meaning Eng then spend significant time re-aligning to new directions rather than delivering sustained and reliable value to customers. - If you’re unfortunate enough to hold a “Staff” title, be prepared for illogical reasoning and questionable technical decisions to be offloaded onto you because you’ve been deemed competent enough to survive context switching every second of the day. When you inevitably burn out, your reward will be to get publicly questioned about the “velocity drops”, scapegoated and quietly demoted under the guise of “performance calibration”. - Decision-making is overly centralised, with strategy now reflecting the opinion of one or two individuals’ egos rather than any collective insight, data or customer evidence. This opinionated way of working and the environment it has created is what has really caused so many tenured folks to leave ever since the start of 2025. - Those who appear busy or get good at aligning themselves with the constantly changing narratives are rewarded over those who are actually deep in the trenches and delivering real customer value. The result is a treadmill of fake progress where entire quarters are spent building decks and re-jigging timelines. For example: they’ve been working on a new version of the product for 2 years now and even after 4 restarts of the same thing, all they have to show is something that doesn’t even have basic login and authentication! It’s no wonder one of the most capable EMs finally left with a leaving speech thanking only herself to have put up with the chaos for so long. - There’s zero psychological safety left regardless of which department you’re in (but particularly worse if you’re an Engineer): just endless meetings, performance theatre, and paranoia.