Pros
- Amazing team mates, both from a personal as well as a professional point of view. Colleagues are easy-going and understanding of personal circumstances (e.g. need to drop of kids at daycare). At the same time they're some of the most talented, hard-working people I've worked with. They are passionate about tech and care about the work they deliver. It's a great environment to learn and grow. - Product is quite fun to work on. Sure, there are more exciting products one could work on (depending on personal taste), but I've had fun implementing some of the most central features of the product. It's a visual product, so not too dry, but includes enough technical depth to be challenging; video delivery and AI are some interesting technical aspects. - There were some bumps along the way when it comes to engineering leadership, but I'm very happy with our current management. They have strong social skills, emphasize their role as people-manager as opposed to getting too technical. They leave technical details to tech leads and ICs - which I think is great. - Founders are passionate, technically literate, but generally hand control to front-line teams. - Fully remote - lots of freedom to structure your workday. There is about 1-2 hours of dedicated timezone overlap between our remote team mates. This is when team meetings are scheduled and you are expected to be available. - I think it's a testament to engineering culture that at time of writing we haven't had a single IC leave the company.
Cons
- Doesn't apply to me personally, but some ICs have disproportionately been burdened with handling outages. This wasn't necessarily a deliberate decision by management, and they have taken steps to address the issue. But as is common in startups, there have been periods where workloads were higher than normal. - Challenges of a fully remote team apply. Might be hard to jump on an ad-hoc meeting with a specific person given timezone differences. - If you like the dynamics of a physically co-located team, this might not be the best fit. - We struggled for some time to find fitting senior engineering management. This led to a few managers coming and going, which was a bit chaotic and confusing. - Our pace of growth means we've been restructuring frequently for the past few months. Not a good fit if you're looking for an absolutely predictable job; your team and focus of work might change relatively quickly. - It can be challenging to get enough time allocated for working off tech debt. Senior leadership is very aware that significant time must be allocated, but somehow feature work has crept in every quarter, pushing out time allocations for working on tech debt.