Pros
- Company culture is customer-focused. It builds real products that customers want. - The core technology is something that a company can be built on top of - No one is looking over your shoulder telling you what to do. No micromanagement - Chances are you will find yourself engaging in areas outside your expertise, which provides great opportunities to learn - Chances are you will get to work on some cool stuff - You interact with lots of talent across multiple engineering disciplines from mechanical and electrical to software and dev-ops. - Good medical/dental/vision benefits and unlimited PTO, (the caveat being that you have to make sure to actually use the PTO)
Cons
- More likely than not you are working above your pay level, and no bonus or incentive pay otherwise. You just have to hope that the stock options you get from your normal pay package are worth a lot some day. - You have to be vigilant about maintaining work/life balance and general sanity at work. There's always lots of work to do, and it's easy to get spread too thin or otherwise overworked. - There's not much organizational structure, and not much prioritization that happens at a high level. The majority of coordination happens at an individual level, so you have to communicate a lot to make sure you're prioritizing the right things and not duplicating work. - Parts of the company's dev tools and infrastructure feel fragmented and immature. Improvements are happening all the time, but it is currently still a work in progress.