Pros
- There is a *ton* of interesting stuff to work on - everything from hardware devices like body-scanners and big-screens, to our own EMR, infrastructure that automates work on behalf of the care team, mobile app, metrics services, billing systems, a CRM, our own ORM etc. etc. - even our more standard CRUD backend APIs have some interesting twists that we've gotten a lot of value out of
- People are genuinely very thoughtful, curious and quite diverse, not just in terms of race/gender but in terms of background/experience/opinion. I regularly learn new things about a variety of subjects when just talking to people at lunch or towards the end of the day
- We end up accomplishing a lot in a small time, every few months or so I look back and realize that I'm much better as an engineer, time manager, general problem-solver etc. than I was in the previous two months - in some ways there really was no choice if we were going to accomplish our goals (which are often very ambitious)
- A very intellectually honest environment. It's not uncommon for us to be discussing an approach when a decision has been made and someone will bring up a valid point and it will entirely change the direction of the project. *Everyone's* ideas are for the most part taken very seriously
- People seem to really, really love and get value out of the service - and it's currently at about 1% of where we intend to take it, so if we can execute, the results could be extremely cool
Cons
- There is a *ton* of interesting stuff to maintain
- Long hours
- Relatively high stakes if things break (could negatively impact someone's health), which can be stressful
- We set very high and sometimes unrealistic expectations for our members/potential members
- At the end of the day this is a ventured-backed startup, so even though we don't optimize for insurance companies, we do sometimes need to do things/build things a certain way for investor/VIP demos etc. this will become less of a problem as the business gets more and more able to stand on it's own feet w/o new funding
