Pros
- You will be working on one of the most challenging products in your professional life, You might get something exciting to build later, but not as much as hypertrack. - At any point in time you'll be surrounded by phenomenal colleagues from all around the world. hypertrack does a great job of attracting talent (fails to retain most of them). - If you are able to keep up with the leadership (very very hard to do as an engineer, who tend to be stretched in several directions, almost doing 2-3 engineers job), you'll thrive. - Their latest product has matured quite well (v3.2 and beyond). Earlier iterations (v3.1 and v2) were buggy, inconsistent and hard to maintain. The current engineering leadership has made hypertrack an engineering marvel. (when I was around, they didn't have a single instance of an EC2 machine running) Bugs if any, were easy to triage. (Read the AWS blog on hypertrack)
Kontras
- No job security what so ever (even engineers who are working as expected/directed can get disposed off), extremely high attrition (for a company with not more than 20 employees, the org's churn rate is ~500%), random firing of employees (don't be surprised if you talked to colleague on Friday and their slack account was deleted on a Monday). Working at hypertrack is like being in a never ending elimination round. - hypertrack uses production customers for QA. (This could be addressed very easily.) - Employee benefits are absent, there is the bare minimum, and nothing beyond. Outside SF/US office there are detriments. Learning is not encouraged, you'll not have the time or the opportunity to do it. Absence of any employee support structure (They have no HR/HR like person, org is not big enough to have it, and that is by design, but sure is old enough) - For a company that is 5+ years old the culture has failed to evolve in ways to benefit the employees in any shape or form. In my tenure I saw the last of Indian employees struggling around in different cities trying to get hold of visas (India doesn't have a strong passport, and hypertrack almost always made very ad hoc offsite plans) after going through all of that, they were expected to produce work/attend meetings late in their evening. - Promise of any benefits or reliefs in the future, be it relocation, severance, promise of better work load balancing, is most probably not happening. They'll not happen either due change in heart of the leadership, which is a quarterly affair (almost always around board meetings) or you'd not be staying long enough to enjoy them. Always take the hypertrack offer for the conditions of the present. - Working with Kashyap as an engineer is intense, while he is a great product guy, his lack of understanding technical limitations, and lack of any patience, will put you in a very tough position. Think of working with Kashyap as working with a demanding customer that controls your future at the company. Revaluate if you want to do this over and over on a daily basis. (PS. Kashyap is the root node of hypertrack, the toxic culture dissipates down from him, even if you do not report to Kashyap. Kashyap might not be involved in your hiring process, but you disappearance from the org will be caused by him directly, or indirectly. Unless you get frustrated and quit yourself) (PS; there are a bunch of reviews from early may 2019, that speak highly of the company and it's culture. Got to know that all of the reviews were added by brand new unsuspecting employees who were requested to add those reviews, hypertrack was a 1-star company at that point on Glassdoor, which hindered their ability to any attract engineers, FYI I did fall for it.)