Pros
- Good peer software engineers - Free lunch, snacks, and drinks, although they're not quite at the tier of the very best in the software industry - Flexible hours and decent work-life balance. You aren't pushed to grind out hours. - Convenient HQ location for commute
Cons
- The CTO, who is alum from Amazon, is heavily biased on bringing in Amazon hires for leadership positions in Product & Engineering. It's a sign that the org is becoming more like Amazon, and not in a good way. The leadership hires also seem to heavily lean towards a specific demographic: Indian males. It's really blatant. - Promotions are rationed, probably to hold down compensation expense. But even if you get promotion, compensation increase is typically small. - Review cycles drag on months past their scheduled end time. - If there's an issue related to compensation, you can expect it to be resolved in the company's favor. For example, someone should have been paid a referral bonus before they left because they met all the requirements, but the payment was late, and then afterwards the company said that they don't need to pay out the referral bonus anymore since the person is no longer an employee. In another example, there were employees who joined prior to a capital raise and were promised options at a certain strike price, but because the company was late in issuing them their equity comp, those employees got their options at a higher strike price, which is less favorable to their compensation. It's either incompetence in HR / compensation processes, or intentionally screwing over employees; in either case, it's not good. - Product managers are not able to do their jobs effectively because the CEO overrides their plans and decisions based on gut feeling and the feedback he hears from agents. This may be a contributing cause with the issues with product direction, where the end outcome is poor product adoption. And all the product decisions he makes are going to make Compass more into a brokerage, and not into a tech/software company with high margins. - Company has had layoffs recently and salary reductions. Partly this is due to coronavirus which has heavily impacted company revenues. It's going to be a tough time ahead, and it's hard to see a path to IPO. How can the company justify a decent IPO price when it's still operating like a regular brokerage? Investors will ask why not just buy Realogy instead? - The biggest problem with the startup, if you apply learnings from Silicon Valley startups, is lack of product/market fit. If you didn't have generous signing bonuses and commission splits for agents, would they be flocking to join you based on your product offering? No. I think that easy VC money has allowed the company to expand aggressively via incentivized recruitment and brokerage acquisitions, while putting off the problem of building a compelling product. This is the problem that must be solved before anything else, to build a viable company.
