Pros
Why I like working at PermitFlow: I'll break this into two parts - why I like the company PermitFlow (generically useful), and why I like being a software engineer here (useful to a certain subset of people). Company wide: PermitFlow is solving a very real pain point that no one else is solving. The market opportunity for us is large and we’re growing rapidly (both in terms of revenue and headcount), and our customers love our product. I also really enjoy the positive social impact of our work. For example, many solar companies that were previously bogged down by permitting delays are now installing more solar panels. We also handle permitting for EV charger installations, and and of course we handle permitting for new homes, which hopefully will help ease the housing shortage. Engineering perspective: Our team builds a lot of useful features fast, and it's exciting to contribute to it. I think our team has the right approach to using AI - we treat it as a useful tool to solve problems - but we also focus on delivering the most customer value. Some of our cool AI use cases are extracting info out of documents or emails, navigating and parsing municipal portals to monitor applications, researching permit requirements and checking our work for potential errors. But we also focus on coming up with good technical designs, and building features where just old fashioned software engineering principles are needed. Our team is split with some fully remote team members, and others based out of the NY office (like me). It's fun to jam in person with team members, and we periodically have time for the entire team to get together in person. The quality of talent here is very high which makes it fun to work together.
Cons
Company wide: Not necessarily a con, but the team works hard. It's not crazy hours, but it's more than a 40hr work week (it's fairly common to see some people do some amount of work in the evenings or on weekends). Comp is also pretty high to reward us for working hard. Benefits aren't bad: lunch at the office and dinner if you stay late, fully covered health insurance, unlimited PTO policy (where people actually take time off), but they're not as good as some larger tech companies. There's no matching 401k or megaback door roth 401k and no fancy perks that some of the big tech companies offer. Also, stock options must be exercised within 90 days of leaving the company, rather than 10 (or some number of) years after grant date which some other companies offer. Gender diversity could also be better, and this is something that we're actively working on improving. Engineering perspective: We're a fast growing team and we've had some growing pains. When I first joined the company we didn't have a roadmap which caused some confusion/suboptimal decisions, and now we have a quarterly roadmap, but we're still working on this process. I'm sure we'll having more growing pains as we scale, and a cool part of working here is you can help solve some of them. Lots of people on our team have strong opinions. I think many of us (including myself) wanted to join a small start up because we are excited about impacting the company's direction. I've noticed because we're more opinionated, disagreements are more common than at my last job where people cared less, but it's generally fairly easy to resolve these disagreements.
