Work yourself to death. Crush it. Show the data. But prepare to never be listened to or valued.
Pros
Note that I am writing this a year after my employment at Harness after continuing to see a decline in what was once a great place to work. - When I started, we hired the best and brightest and treated them as such. Was a great place to work with the top 5% of talent in Silicon Valley. - A year after being at Harness, I value what I learned there from the best in the biz. And other workplaces feel slow and sluggish even though to them they're "moving fast". Benefit of being in the sweatshop that was Harness. - The people are great, talented, friendly. Challenge is how the company culture burns everyone out and spits them out. - Great place to learn and test your mettle not only technically but with inter-office politics - Products are good and actually innovative, but little investment in getting that out there. Market momentum will likely carry Harness to a decent valuation that will benefit shareholders.
Cons
- Culture went down the drain. When I started (around 200 employees), we hired the best and did whatever it took to retain them. The perks were great, culture was the best ever...how lucky were you to work at Harness?? Not anymore. - Decisions are made top-down even though you're told you're empowered. Direction changes on a whim, and you spend all your time working on tactics with no time to breathe or be strategic and stick to a plan. - The numbers to hit grow exponentially and unreasonably. My reward for crushing my product line's number? No promotion. No raise. No bonus. Fewer resources. Triple the revenue target for the next FY. - GTM strategy is not aligned with company vision and product strategy. We were supposed to build "best in class" products for each vertical and dominate each vertical with those products. But GTM is focused on CD primarily, and the rest is platform. No room to actually come in and grow a business unless you're ok doing everything through the lens of CD and just being an add-on/margin add. - Strong culture of finger-pointing. Makes no sense who is getting promoted vs. who is not. Most of the job is workplace politics to get anything done -- that's not why you join a startup. - CEO runs 2 companies and a venture fund. How much time is actually being spent building this biz? - Options valuation has gone down 75% in the time I was there. It has gone up a bit since then and lots of buyers in the secondary market right now.