Pros
- Amazing colleagues in the technical and non-technical roles. Have encountered very few people who I wouldn't gladly work with. - Technology is truly substantially better and more advanced than competitors. As a data scientist using the software to solve real problems, it is exponentially better and faster than doing it using manual methods. - Company has the opportunity to be an iconic name and make a big impact in the world. I think the leadership has good goals and intentions. - Ability to learn from colleagues and grow as a data scientist. Every day our slack channels are full of interesting data science content, tons of data science internal training opportunities for team. Getting to work on a huge variety of use cases and aspects of data science that you otherwise wouldn't get the same amount of exposure to. - Flat hierarchy is nice, people trust you to do what you think is important, very strong 'mentoring' and feedback. Really enjoy my colleagues - Company has made huge investments in employees and outside of pure corporate objectives. Programs like Dream Big are awesome. AI for Good is really inspiring to hear how we can help non-corporate entities. - New leadership team (COO + other new exec leadership) is a big improvement and professionalization. Other comments about buddies of CEO are a bit exaggerated but not totally untrue. New, more professional leaders coming into the company are helping to correct those problems. - The CEO is a visionary within data science and really motivating. Seems like an interesting guy, and a good force in the company - especially with experience leaders to helps. - Perks are nice (pay, remote work, great tech equipment, vacation, benefits, etc).
Cons
- As others have stated, its a remove company and a startup. I'm not naturally a morning person, but have many days that start at 7am for me to be in a 9am EST meeting. I set limits on my time and don't regularly work nights or weekends (probably average 2-4 hrs/week outside of 7am-5pm working hours... but there are sometimes crunch periods that ask more) - I don't think the CEO's strength is running a 1k person start-up. He's done well, but we needed a true professional to take us to the next step. CEO is a character and somethings says goofy impromptu(weird but not bad) things in company meeting settings. He's not a polished 'business professional' speaker in these internal meetings, so you can get some interesting moments of him going on an odd tangent. - Losing colleagues was really tough and discouraging. COVID is hitting everyone, and company took a proactive step to set us up for success. Unfortunately that means letting people go before things started to get bad... which makes you feel odd as you had valued colleagues let go. - No 401k match is a bummer, but not a big deal. Higher salary than industry makes up for it.