Pros
* Free food * Not the best but still pretty good pay. Especially during the past few years, many bonuses were given away to stop people from leaving. * Some colleagues around you are smart and awesome.
Cons
* Sales/Consulting-driven culture: C3 is good at selling demos but struggles with making good products. There are many horrible "sell first, build/fix later" stories. Some leadership members have never been engineers but were previously consultants. These individuals have no idea how to build software products, yet they like to pretend they understand tech and make people do pointless work. The customer solution department, which is in charge of customer-facing projects, is full of consultants who don’t know anything about software or AI. * Top-down culture: This was initiated by the CEO himself. All the executives, VPs, directors, etc., are a bunch of yes-men because those who dared to challenge their bosses are no longer with the company. Micromanagement occurs every day, with leadership constantly passing orders and pressures to low-level management and ICs. * Poor technology: C3 builds its own proprietary platform that runs on top of AWS/GCP/Azure and uses the so-called “C3 Type system” for object-oriented programming. However, these technologies are archaic, buggy, not user-friendly, and do not scale well. Most engineers and data scientists are stuck with the C3 platform and therefore do not directly use AWS/GCP/Azure and some of the common open-source technologies such as Spark, Airflow, etc. This significantly hampers your career growth since the tools you use here won’t be applicable if you get a new job. * Low job security. People are fired every quarter. * No WFH allowed at all - but this is already well known. Many people stay in the company simply because of constraints in visa status or financial reasons. The company typically uses retention bonuses or includes terms in the offer letters to prevent people from leaving because they know the retention rate would be very low without them. One example is that you have to return the sign-on bonus and any attorney fees for visa processing if you quit before completing 1.5 years (or 2 years in some cases). Many people are simply waiting for the date when they’re free to leave, or when they get the RSU/bonus/visa they want, etc. Due to the bad culture and requirement for fully onsite work, C3 has also been struggling to recruit and keep senior professionals and has been hiring more new grads.