Pros
- Remote, flexible, and work-from-home options for engineers. Some flexible and work-from-home options for people in other departments. - Some great individual contributors in engineering and product. - Genuinely interesting product to work on. - Well-funded startup.
Cons
- Management overhired drastically in both engineering and product, leading to a lot of people either not being onboarded well enough to contribute or just coasting without work to do, depending on the team. When management sees that work isn't getting done, their reaction is to hire more people, which only makes the problem worse. Management is also slow to fire problematic hires, if they fire them at all, so the problems fester indefinitely and compound over time. - Projects that affect multiple teams/product verticals (think refactors, platform projects, data projects) are extremely difficult or impossible to complete due to territorial behavior amongst the exec team and product leadership. Stealing projects from other teams or calling team meetings to talk down other people's projects isn't unheard of, and usually management doesn't even realize it's happening because they don't keep sufficient tabs on their reports or projects, to begin with. - If you work remotely, it's very difficult to take significant responsibility for projects, because so much happens in hallway conversations or closed-door meetings in the New York office. This is especially true if your role requires interacting with groups outside of engineering and product (e.g. business, operations, artist partnerships), all of which hire exclusively in New York. This is likely to get worse as the company grows, since people outside of engineering usually want the New York-based engineers to sit directly next to them so they can chat outside of Slack, rather than having engineering on a different floor or just not having engineers in the office at all. - If you work remotely, even if you do manage to snag an invite to a meeting, it's unlikely you'll be able to contribute, because so much of the staff works in New York, and they all end up in a conference room together. Even if the AV were amazing (it is not), it still wouldn't solve the problem of being outnumbered 10 to 1--because yes, there are 10+-person meetings! 10+. person. meetings. Some of them are recurring, and some of them last upwards of an hour. - Hiring has skewed more junior in engineering than is probably advisable for a company of this size, which means that projects take longer to ship, aren't as well-tested as they could be, fall over more often in prod, aren't extensible when new product features are requested, etc. - Quarterly OKRs are often planned without direct feedback from engineers, which means that many OKRs end up not getting shipped for entirely foreseeable reasons, projects go off the rails, and people in other departments who were depending on those projects getting shipped become rightfully upset. - Relatedly: lots of arguing, complaining, yelling, pointing fingers, etc. amongst the execs, and occasionally that bubbles over into them doing the same at staff. - Many of the hires are "social justice types", but then they're thrown into teams with people who are exactly the opposite--openly saying that they don't know how to work with people from underrepresented groups, don't want to work with women, etc. A couple of those hiring managers just won't hire women unless they're guilted or forced into it; they'll pull the whole "I just don't see this person in this role" shtick even when the candidate is overqualified and comes with references.
