Interesting Product - Horrendously Poisonous Culture
Pros
I was with the company as a software engineer since the early days - a time when Magic Leap was small and nimble, and there was a great deal of excitement and genuine passion in the air. A time when there was considerable camaraderie between everyone involved. We all truly felt part of one not so big family. If you think that is Magic Leap today though, you are sadly mistaken.
Cons
Note: Be weary of all the positive reviews. The HR is pushing employees to publish positive reviews. I have often thought about why and how things went wrong as I spent some of my best years as a software engineer at the company, and I truly believe that Magic Leap's true curse was its staggering 2.3 billion dollars in investment, which sent it down a path of inorganic growth. You see, when you raise that much money, you have to show constant progress to the now nervous investors in order to keep their trust and secure subsequent flow of cash - since as a measure of safety not all funds are handed out to an enterprise at the beginning of a fund raising event in one go - and for Magic Leap, earning that trust unfortunately came in the form of 1) rapid expansion (since nothing shows money is well spent than headcount), 2) doctored demos and false promises. Much has been said about (2), but as for (1), after the first round of investments, VPs and middle managers immediately got busy building their internal empires (with a moat to go with it) to claim a bigger share of the pie, and an unhealthy internal competition ensued. As a result of this rapid expansion and in-fighting, culture quickly deteriorated, and that, coupled with poor hiring decisions at the very top of especially the software org, gave birth to a dysfunctional organization where excessively nasty office politics is the moda operandi. And that is the sad story of Magic Leap today.
