Pros
TL;DR --> Great work/life balance and one of the best data science teams in Chicago. Uptake offers great work-life balance and flexible hours. No one is watching when you come in and when you leave, and your desk is just a place that's reserved for you...I regularly went more than a week without ever working at my desk. The data science team created some genuinely BRILLIANT solutions to really difficult problems in applying machine learning to IIoT data / problems. The data science team's collaborative culture and the high quality of my coworkers was amazing. Recent high attrition of really talented people means that the company will be in chaotic everything-is-on-fire startup mode for the foreseeable future...I call that a pro because I know that's genuinely attractive for some people. Uptake has access to datasets you won't find at many other jobs. You can make real friends here, I know I did!
Cons
TL;DR --> Uptake's management have lost employees' trust and a LOT of talented people have left in a short period of time. Uptake's leadership have lost the faith of frontline and employees, and they should have. 1000s of hours of work and an unknown amount of money were wasted over the last two years by misguided product decision-making. Leadership (even on the engineering side) has a very poor technical understanding of how to successfully build services, systems, and platform. The past year, platform teams (and others within Uptake) were subjected to a barrage of unprincipled layoffs. The most egregious happened in Spring 2019, when a round of layoffs was presented as "making the tough choices necessitated by our new strategy"...and then Platform teams were asked to spend a few weeks proposing a new strategy. Almost all of Uptake's architectural talent has left recently or is leaving soon. The engineering side lacks strong voices to keep an eye on over-arching concerns like app security, scalability, observability, etc. Important information is regularly discussed in private forums (DMs, private slack channels, email chains, exclusive after-hours meetings) even when it is not sensitive, feeding the distrust of management. The Chief Architect Uptake brought in about a year ago has been a polarizing figure and the senior leadership who installed him have refused to acknowledge that fact and the impact it has had on company culture. Really poor racial and gender diversity, especially amongst leadership. Almost all of senior leadership are white men. The company doesn't seem to be hiring at all, so it's unlikely that is going to change soon.