Pros
Over the course of 4 years, the company has changed so dramatically that it would be impossible to review my entire time here. I would however highlight the following themes which have been consistent throughout my time at Iterative Health: 1) "passionate impact" - I have always found there to be a consistent culture of people who care about the work we are doing and will do what it takes to get it done. We've had many a disagreement on a variety of questions over the years, but they all stemmed from a shared passion for the work we are doing and commitment to doing it well. People here care about impact; it is not simply about doing the minimum required but achieving real outcomes. It's not an understatement to say that real lives are at stake, and Iterative Health does an important job of connecting those dots, both in education and vision casting and in execution. 2) "Visionary" - I think a large part of why the company has been so successful has been its vision and the implementation of said vision. While the technology and models we have built at IH are key to the success of the company, good technology relies on a strong vision and follow-through to know how to make it mean something, and despite not being business-focused myself, I do think a lot of the power and success of the company is owed to the visionaries driving the company forward. 3) "Collaborative culture" - I have been able to work with many different people in my time here, and I have long appreciated how willing people are to help others learn, push projects to the finish line, and invest in one another's growth. There is a very "in it together" team culture, both intra-team/department and inter-department, and people desire to empower one another toward success, both for each of us individually and us collectively. For instance, my manager has invested a lot in making sure, to the degree to which he is able, that our voices are heard and that we have clear plans toward growing our careers, and team members are more than willing to work together to address bugs or blockers in order to push forward on projects. 4) "Intellectually stimulating" - The problems we get to work on in the ML team have taught me a lot about ML and engineering, and each new project is a chance to learn something new and solve interesting problems.
Kontras
* Startups often mean that people need to wear different hats. I think we are much closer to the size where there are more defined rules and movement toward specialization. Because of varying resources (e.g. needing more engineers), the ML team does sometimes still need to take on certain work outside the typical purview of what ML engineers are expected to do. This has been great for developing new essential skills, but as we grow, our trajectory is being able to focus more on ML specifically. * With a rapidly growing company, communication has always been challenging. I think we have made great strides toward improving the systems of communication, whether coordinating across teams or communicating design and project decisions within the team, but this is definitely a continued area of growth. * As a fast growing company, we initially prioritized completion of work over documentation of design decisions, which with turnover over the years has meant that there is more work involved in figuring out why certain decisions were made so that we don't break things or end up rediscovering decisions by refactoring previous work. We are doing better in documentation now on all levels, but it is a common tension between documentation/thoroughness and speed that we are working on navigating better.