Magic Leap reviews

In the early years, there was such a push for product launch, product launch, product launch that the company culture and infrastructure was a mere afterthought. Efforts since have been taken in order to initiate a good culture, but too little, too late. In the thrush of a multitude of lawsuits, no internal mobility, and expectations on deliverables in an environment that fostered a "dog eat dog" type of vibe, it turned into a not-so-happy company to be a part of anymore. It's truly a shame as the product itself has a lot of promise. The company, not so much.

* It's not a startup, but pretends it is to justify crunch. * Huge segments of the population in HQ are from Motorola and Blackberry. This plays into how lots of people regard the product, its development, and office politics. You'll find very quickly that the product is often regarded in similar terms as an Android phone. Many of the project managers and senior leadership often refer back to their previous work experience for examples as to how to develop the product itself, and you may find that (like myself) you disagree with this approach. * Like any organization of this size, politics runs rampant. There are massive slowdowns in hiring in certain segments, and we frequently lose prospective employees because our process did not grow as fast as we hired. These growing pains have formed cracks throughout the organization which so many things fall through. * Software seems incredibly segregated and divorced from business development and QA. QA is treated like the company whipping post being horrendously understaffed and completely isolated from the rest of software: an organizational hierarchy that is obviously taken from Motorola/Blackberry/Nokia. Our devops/build team is also horrendously understaffed and so much of the day to day of a developer may be spent dealing with breakages that wouldn't occur if we had a coherent organization and developer-oriented testing mindset. * Crunch is regarded as a cost of doing business rather than a management failure. * The aforementioned growing pains are only made worse by the open attitude with regards to experimentation with tech. The company is divided on the simplest of things like what video conferencing tool is used, what chat tool is used, how official announcements are made, etc. While half of the company uses Slack and the other half uses Google Hangouts, it's not seen as any particular issue with senior leadership expressing both there and in more important aspects that "developer freedom" trumps any other concern. * Generally all of the cons described here _will never change_. There's a lot of room for personal growth and development. There's a lot of room for influencing the company culture in very _public_ ways or in ways which reflect on our vision of ourselves, but not in any actual _tangible_ way in my opinion. * At least one member of senior leadership is infamous for being incredibly rude and uncaring (to put it kindly). If you are in software, you will quickly learn that most of software is alternately terrified of him or otherwise forced to satisfy his whims over the health of the product or their own emotional/mental health. In my opinion, he is the single most destructive force in the company and he has either the complete and total support of senior leadership because of past experience at older companies (see previous remarks) or because senior leadership is just that divorced from the actual organizational control structures throughout the company. Many, _many_ people have left the company citing him as their reason. * IT is horrendously mismanaged, in my opinion, being reduced largely to triage and onboarding. Many of the bureaucratic political issues that I've previously described hurt IT. * If you're in HQ, then Florida is an interesting place. It has its pros and cons, the biggest one being that there's basically no other opportunities in the area. So if you come out here, do so either with the expectation that you're going to move _back_ to a tech hub at some point or you've decided to make Magic Leap your career for the foreseeable future. But if you're coming, don't expect to find anything else in the area when you want to move on.