ups and downs, but good work
Pros
Lot's of work and lots of hard workers help the days go by quick and a sense accomplishment. Plenty of room to prove your worth if you're good at what you do. The industry has gone through a period of frozen liquidity and despite the false buzz of high valuations from the year of inflated unicorns (2014-2015), after recovering from this downturn we are better slotted for success than ever before. Despite all we've been through, the management at the top are good guys and passionate about the positive side of the industry. We leverage larger institutional funding for our loans, but at the core we represent smaller funds, giving individual lenders the opportunity for higher returns, and providing loans to thousands of people that have nowhere else to turn. The big banks have done their damage and our product is a p2p network of people helping each other compete in a space we create. Check out the facebook page to get an idea of the impact this product offering has had on people's lives. Also, we've achieved great success purging toxic energy internal to the company. After the big layoffs, anyone else still not happy has had plenty of time to find something else. The people left are here to work and if anyone is still complaining about the past, they just look bad like they must have been such a bad hire they can't find anything else. For the people that want to work, there are plenty of open ears and opportunities to help improve things. I find it impressive how much we've been able to turn everything around for the positive. Now is a good time to join because we're rebuilding and expecting rapid growth again, but this time we're better prepared for it.
Cons
All the ruminating on negativity instead of working towards solutions, shown by many of the reviews on this site. The engineering work is hard enough in itself, balancing tech tradeoffs and choreographing iterative production releases can be crippling if you don't find your voice heard or your work getting out into production. Luckily most the engineers suffering from this constraint ruminating have moved on, but to understand how so many people who gained upwards of a 50 percent salary adjustment to their career can complain about the company that launch padded for their career, you have to understand the history of the department. Since the company was bought by new management late 2013, we've had three major changes in engineering management. The initial purchase came with a series of layoffs that left an elite skeleton crew with much pride and passion in their work and a plan for solving the lingering technical bottlenecks. The 2014 management came in talking about how we would fix all our problems with introducing a rapid development stack, which was not well received by the previous tech leads and people started leaving with a sense of all their hard work not being appreciated even though the company grew around 400%. 2015 was new prosper management v2, move to Java ASAP with rapid hiring. This wave peaked with dissatisfied employees. Older employees were told to fall in line with the new political agenda (silicon valley's box in the back of a server farm effect) and new employees were pulling long hours on a thrown together platform without functional dev infrastructure support resulting in their boss getting a promotion for their work, seemingly no appreciation from the older staff, and too much time spinning the wheels on the hell that appears from overwriting shared configs, libraries, and deploys from a few overcrowded dev environments. It felt like a war of management, the new java initiative had over promised deliverables, lies had already been told to the executives on the progress of said deliverables, there was apparent pressure for heads to roll when deadlines were missed and everyone was trying to cover their tracks. It wasn't just a war between dev, product, and QA, it was the classic fear of mentioning that the emperor wasn't wearing any clothes. It sounds dramatic, but when stress and passions are high, things are dramatic and this is why there are so many bad reviews from every different perspectives on this site. 2016 new management v3, forget the politics, let's make prosper great again. (note, there is no public discussion of the actual presidential race, it's just a good metaphor ) Despite the much needed round of layoffs, we finally have management with very high approval ratings. The extreme glassdoor reviews gives insight into the amount of toxic purging done. We're finally focusing on paying off tech dept, building out a great platform template with all the microservices best practices, fixing our environments, configs, deploys, and anything else that was crippling us under load. We can finally get back to actual engineering and building software in harmony. Working in smaller teams is a little easier and we've gotten back to good collaboration, centralized architecture focus, and fixing all the problems that haunted us under load. It's been a year of less new feature development and more fixing internal issues.
