Pros
Talented colleagues Interesting problem space The business has tremendous growth potential Potentially good payout if Scale exits Great entry point to AI for people without an engineering background
Cons
Cons below may not apply to other roles Terrible WLB - on the client-facing ops side, many people work 80+ hours and weekend work is typical. I have been in this role for 6+ months and haven't seen any material improvement. There's a lot of lip service like "improving WLB is top of mind" but no change after months lol Tedious work and limited learning - I spend lots of time on tedious and meaningless work because our tooling and infrastructure are bad. Examples include: trying to figure out why contractors didn't get paid; trying to figure out why contractors don't see work; reviewing data labeling work; fighting different people to get (and keep) the contractors for my projects; updating 10 different trackers for various stakeholders and many more Limited upward mobility - the org structure fundamentally doesn't allow most people to move up. We have an "inverse T" structure where we have many people at the bottom, no one in the middle, and very few at the top. It's simply impossible for people to move up with this org structure vs a more typical pyramid structure Immature leadership - many people in leadership positions have never gone through a mature organization. They tend to be strong ICs but their leadership skills are questionable. For example, a good leader would care about the onboarding experience of new employees but what I saw was we frequently put new folks to do things that they had never done before with very little support Lies and broken promises - just two examples: we used to paint a very different story about the job in the interview. We stopped doing this after realizing people would leave quickly when they found out about the lie. We also used to tell candidates that they could get 200% of their base as bonus but in reality, the vast majority get 50% or less and the bonus is delayed by 4-6 months. Success is not rewarded but failures are heavily punished - we are basically incentivized to do as little as possible. The more I do, the more likely something will go wrong (since many things are out of my control). If I don't get rewarded for the success and only get punished for the failures, why should I go above and beyond?