Pros
- Many good natured and very well well-meaning co-workers. - Very diverse: people come from all walks of life and backgrounds
Kontras
In the interview, they're describe the process as Agile. This may be a goal but not a reality. The position might be described as full stack. This is also just a goal. They'll describe it as a practical way to pick up machine learning. This is a lie. dotData was spun off from NEC and has NEC as a major customer which does give some stability that other startups might not be able to expect, but in turn it picks up a lot of the bad practices of a maladjusted large corporation: - tons of unhelpful bureaucracy - splitting teams into horizontal layers so you always have to wait on others to get things done - most importantly, requirements are divorced from reality. Product *will* ask for analysis of requirements but often months in advance, without tracking assumptions, without prioritizing risky functionality, without adapting to details as they arise. The state of the code reflects this. - Expect nightly CI failures in the 10s to 100s, so many that they're just bucketed rather than fixed. - Expect failures in the deployed code that pass CI, since the configuration between CI and deployed environments are significantly different. - Expect a monorepo... but with a homegrown, naive, and inefficient build system and effectively manually-managed sub-repos. - Want a fast feedback loop? For at least some sub-repos expect 20 minutes for *unit tests* on ~150,000 lines of code. For PR builds expect 90 minute builds with at least one re-run due to flaky tests. - Want to rely on standards? Be prepared to hack through a lot of re-invented wheels and code that bypasses the built-in functionality of imported library for reasons that no one can seem to explain. I believe there is a divide among employees: newer hires, usually those who have worked at a startup before, and those who came from corporate engineering or corporate consultancy. The ones with startup experience either quit within a few months or try pushing, unsuccessfully, for change, while those who come from a corporate background don't realize just what a horror show the product is. Most start ups fail. Unless drastic changes are made I expect dotData to be included in that.