Fantastic engineers and product managers....but management drives burnout
Pros
* Interesting blend of start up and established company. Frugal culture where employees are expected to be mature and find their own routines, not place importance on a cushy work environment. No distracting perks and attempts are made to place money where it is needed. * Engineers are some of the smartest and hardest working people I've met. There is a huge focus on clean coding and building a stable app in engineering (unfortunately this effort can be sabotaged by R&D management and CEO). Engineers split effort of maintaining code base, introducing junior devs, and raising coding standards - everyone takes the initiative and contributes. Engineers learn a lot from each other very quickly - a few months here are like years in another shop in terms of professional development. * Business outlook is good and opportunities and benefit to your career here are endless (both inside and outside of engineering) provided that you can work the extreme hours * Open office environment, real-time communication * Engineers work very closely with product managers and QA team * Angular, Java, and C# are primary languages, but effort is made to use best supporting libraries and workflow tools - few restrictions.
Cons
* Small vacation time allotment (10 days), limited benefits * Extreme hours (12-16+ every day, full days in the office on weekends have been required in the past with only informal compensation). Weekend meetings are required for product managers. * Individual engineering decisions are made or signed off on personally by CEO, R&D expertise (including product management) does not rule. * Sprints are on a one week basis despite protests of agile teams - CEO personally sets sprint cadence and agile operations, not Scrum masters or R&D management * Employees can do little to shape culture here As with any company, hours are bad during critical times (at the end of every weekly sprint, before industry demos and events, during releases) - but almost every day can be considered a critical time and even on the rare light days, expect to work 10-12 hours. A few things to mention for just for transparency's sake: Hiring is difficult, so engineers will downplay hours in interviews. This is a great opportunity if you can survive - but it will be extremely difficult and costly. Do not expect any concerns or suggestions for how the company can be improved upon to be listened to with respect or seen as anything other than complaints. Engineers leave on a frequent basis due to this, and those who have made the personal decision to trade the benefits for low standards for how they are treated.