Pros
Experience here seems to vary a lot by team. My team has been genuinely supportive. Pay is at market. Remote works well. There's a lot of communication and regular check-ins. The company is growing a lot. And the product actually improves people's lives in a visible way. There's real impact and real need here.
Cons
Leadership wants to be involved, and the instinct behind that is good. However their level of involvement doesn't make sense for the size the company has grown to. Everything, regardless of scale, gets brought to senior leadership. By definition they aren't close enough to the day-to-day to have context on why a given approach on a project was chosen. So their default is: question it, object to it, expand it to be more aligned to the level they are operating at. Scope inflates. Timelines slip. Small projects that could have a 1-2 week turnaround become major multi-quarter undertakings. By the time they are delivered, the window of opportunity to have impact is frequently closed. If a team of IC's is aligned but one person isn't happy with the direction, I have witnessed people will escalate to senior leadership as a way to stall or even halt the project. And it works 100% of the time. As a result, quick wins (and quick failures, which are just as valuable when de-risked) start to sit in the backlog indefinitely. Small blockers become permanent ones. The frustration that creates is easy to feel both at the team-level and from our customers.