Pros
- 401k with 100% matching up to 3 percent and 50% matching up to 5%. - Company paid visual, dental, and health insurance with options to pay to get a better plan. - Unlimited PTO, just make sure you use it. - Remote-first so there's no expectation to go into the office and you can easily work out of state. - I can flex my time normally and work when I want, although less so now that we have a bunch of mandatory scrum meetings every day. - Promotions are based off effort and demonstration of skills rather than time at the company/in the industry. - The pay's ok, and the equity is nice. - I do feel like I'm developing as an engineer and learning a lot. - We used to have a learning budget to get books or courses with, but I'm not sure if that's coming back this year. - This can be a pro or a con, but there several different code bases with different languages or ideologies. It can be a pro because there's a chance to learn new things with new frameworks. A con because you're jumping between dramatically different code bases just to get a feature to work.
Cons
- My last raise was under the rate of inflation, as were the raises of all 5 of the coworkers I talked to, so we basically got a pay cut. - A lot of employee churn - many people are changing teams or resigning regularly. This means a lot of things are lost in the shuffle, like knowledge on the code, or employee progress plans. They also haven't been backfilling, so my team has shrunk a lot, but the expectations on us have increased. - The main code base is a wreck and not at all fun to work in. It's extremely tightly coupled, it's poorly documented, and most of the people who knew anything about it left. Changing anything in one of the god-objects is a fun game of "What did I break, and will I find out before or after the code is deployed?" Fresh code becomes legacy code almost immediately because engineered are hustled on to the next project and not given time to do cleanup, docs, tech debt, etc. - A lot of time pressure. They really saw the word "sprint" and decided that sprinting is the speed we're aiming for. Scrum meetings are less "we as a team decide on what to do and how much work we're ok committing to" and more "product gives us things and we get to maybe sort of pick which too-large workload we want." I don't think I've has a single sprint where we don't carry over at least 2 tickets. - Feels weirdly stiff for a startup. That might be the insurance side of it? But none of my coworkers are interested in making conversation beyond the occasional "How was your weekend?" "Good. Yours?" Might be a pro if you hate small talk but I find it hard to build rapport when no one wants to talk for more than 15 seconds about their life outside of work. - Even though I've found it to be reasonably queer friendly, and there are a few BIPOC folks, it's still very much a tech/insurance company in diversity. My team is 2/1 men to women and 3/1 white folks to POC. Upper management in tech is almost exclusively white men. - For higher level positions, there seems to be a lot of hiring external people rather than promoting internally.