Pros
- extremely smart people who genuinely want to do the best they can - great benefits and strong compensation - solid flexibility as a remote-first-ish company - people here really do care about the work they are doing and there's a strong community, below leadership, of learning and mentorship
Cons
Where to even begin - nearly my entire tenure at Fetch has been watching people I respect and admire ground into dust and shoved out when they can no longer take it or the company arbitrarily decided it had no use for them any longer. Two rounds of layoffs in two years and both were complete blindsides. The most recent round came after a strong pivot from a consumer-information company to an AI-first company (exact phrasing from CEO). This corresponded with a promise that employees would not be laid off, and that the exploration of AI was to unlock productivity for everyone at the company. Surprise surprise - 2 months later and 10% of the company (all from tech), including the entire QA department - are laid off. Worse yet, they were all laid off in a single meeting where the CTO read from a transcript while looking away from the screen. Then the CEO would later say "everyone was notified personally and with care and respect". They really think everyone is that dumb, and it's just the most recent example of the fake transparency from a company that hilariously prides itself on trust while practicing the exact opposite. This company enabled a toxic executive for years, someone who once spent an entire town hall arguing that the words that he says, and they way those words make people feel, are the responsibility of the person he is saying them to. If his words are hurtful? Their fault for feeling hurt. There was a heroic engineer who spent the entire town hall arguing against this neanderthalic empathy-lacking tomfoolery, and guess who was laid off in 2023? Speaking of toxic, this is the type of place that uses diversity and inclusivity as a performative badge of hnor whilst simultaneously doing the bare minimum (or less) to make employees who need inclusivity the most feel welcome. The CEO very conveniently hand-waved the remove of "DEI" from the core company values as "well it's obvious that we value diversity and inclusivity, we don't need to say it". This person also once bragged about this month-long trip to Egypt in the same meeting that they talked about the layoffs in 2023, so, you can imagine how inclusive that felt. It's a company that is rotten to the core and that rot starts at the top and ferments and coagulates before trickling down. They trick people at the bottom with promises of rocket ships, golden parachutes, and trillion dollar valuations. I really hope that those people are able to see through it all before Fetch bottoms out and hurts them too.
