Pros
- Great benefits: 401K, top tier benefits (health, dental, vision, long term disability, life 100% paid, financial planning, mental health counseling, fertility planning) - Free food (breakfast, lunch, dinner, free snacks), free gym, employee training resource benefit where buying books/training relevant to the job are subsidized. Exceptional for a smaller company like this. - Probably the first company that I've heard of that actually will pay you to take time off with a $2.5k travel stipend that you're eligible yearly if you provide an itinerary of travel for at least a week. - Great company growth. As of now, the company has reached Series D funding, and is backed by a CEO that has successfully IPOed a company before - Lots of innovation occurring at Anduril. If you are someone who tinkers/develops a lot in their free time, this is the place for you. - You can take more ownership of your product than you do at a big company. You're put into positions where you can lead and get ownership that you might not normally have at a larger company. This is great for early career growth. - If you're starting out, this is probably one of the best places to experiment with hypotheses and new code features that might require more scrutiny in review/approval at larger companies. - Availability for seminars covering front-end dev to corporate life (how to hold successful retros, how to have effective 1-on-1s, etc). - Mission is exciting and meaningful to the world. - Culture is very fast-paced and co-workers are generally supportive.
Cons
- #1 Poor work/life balance, workaholic culture. A fair amount of people tend to stay long hours in the office if they don't have any other obligations (wife, kids, etc.). This is either due to extreme passion for the project, or in the more likely case, too much to do, and not enough time to do it. - #2 No time budgeted to perform on-call duties, i.e. you are expected to have similar output as if you were not on-call. For smaller teams maintaining products with more critical infrastructural roles, the rotation can be extremely frequent (once every 2-3 weeks) and can lead to overwork. - Huge technical debt. Most development efforts tend to go toward amazing demos that generate revenue, but not much afterthought is put into maintenance. However, recent efforts have been put into place to address this, but still are early stage at best. - No centralized/standardized culture of project planning, some teams do it, others don't. While this allows more individual team freedom, for cross-team collaborative efforts, having different project management systems for the same project can be hard to reconcile. - Depending on the team, you may be working as a team or working in a silo. For remote employees, this can quickly become very isolated. Spending time in the office is encouraged if you can. - At times, too much ownership. You are responsible for knowing everything inside and out for at least 5 different apps/services, without much documentation/hard-to-find documentation to guide you. In essence, you are expected to be a jack of all trades, but in practice, a master of none. - 401K has no matching, 100% your contribution, but this is to be expected at a smaller company.