could be better - Engineer MAANA Employee Review

the biggest con is how management treats people with dissenting opinions. lots of really intelligent people were let go for voicing there thoughts. even if you don't end up going a certain direction you shouldn't create an environment where people are petrified of giving there perspective. you are paying people for there perspective not to be a broken tape recorder and say yes to everything executives say. it creates a very weird climate especially for a startup. that was the main reason i left. other cons include: - the platform isn't stable. - its not really 'ai' in the traditional sense - marketing just throws a bunch of buzz words like "big data" "iot" "ai" etc. its more of a framework for stitching together other services which is neat and useful but not really that new or related to cutting edge ml. the in house ai services kind of suck and nowhere near as good as competition from anything you'd' find on aws, azure, or third party libraries/solutions. they should also remove big data from there marketing, i saw the platform choke on a few gigs of data. the platform def has use cases but it is way oversold as some ground breaking thing that everyones supposed to be awe'd by. its not going to change the world or anything like that, there are many many other services that do similar things but that doesn't mean MAANA cant do them better. it just doesn't currently. - management sucks. very arrogant and unhelpful - lots of blaming between teams when things go wrong, instead of working together to solve problems. - overworked and stressed beyond any company I've worked at or heard of, and I'm a senior engineer with decades of experience. do not work here if your not prepared to commit your life to this company. - job security which i guess is standard issue for startups but kind of extreme here. people get hired and are let go within a year so that kind of sucks but i don't know the details since I'm not an executive with all the data. but really really smart people let go all the time which tells me it doesn't have to do with performance but struggling to get funding. but just my guess i don't really know for sure. - an overall depressing atmosphere, wasn't very happy during my 2.5 years. - little to no communication between sales and engineering so lots of customers take advantage and demand ridiculous kinds of work in an impossible timeline with zero push back. leads to stressed out 'war rooms' with people working long nights and weekends - majority of the company has been fired recently, the offices in huston, palo alto, and seattle have been closed so probably not on an upward trend, the company has like zero sales, and struggling to get investment. hopefully they get an injection of cash soon. its been around for 10 years with little profit. - the snacks could be better