LevelUp acquired by GrubHub, but doing its best to maintain fun culture
Pros
The people here are awesome. Some of the smartest people I've ever worked with and they're all around my age (25 at the time of writing this review). I think the average age is something like 28-30. Everyone's eager to help each other learn and get better at what they do. Very collaborative environment. No dress code (at least for engineering positions). Something that LevelUp does best is keeping account management (AMs) away from its developers. At my previous job, AMs constantly came up to me asking me to switch gears and do something for them. It was so stressful and I hated it. That has not happened once in the year and a half I've worked here. Management has guidelines in place to prevent account managers from bombarding the developers with tasks. They must go through a formal ticket creation and grooming flow before the task reaches the developer. Regardless of the acquisition, LevelUp still feels mostly like it did before the acquisition and the culture here is awesome. It's super diverse, everyone promotes equality, and company values are super important to the employees.
Cons
The initial acquisition by Grubhub was a little rough. We had a ton of meetings and we lost some benefits, but not the change in benefits wasn't too bad (at least for me, a single 25 year old male). I still work on LevelUp specific code, but some of my teammates have transitioned full-time to working on the Grubhub app which looks cool but I've heard dealing with their development team can be pretty painful. Grubhub's dev team is not present in the LevelUp Boston office so all communication is done via Slack or phone calls. Luckily, there is more than one developer working on the Grubhub codebase in the Boston office and they are very collaborative in their workflow. I think the worst part about the acquisition was that while it was happening, there was a lot of hype between LevelUp's CEO Seth, and Grubhub's former CEO Stan Chia. We were having a lot of company wide meetings with Seth and Stan for everyone to ask questions and it was going great and they appeared to be very transparent, but it seems as soon as the acquisition became final and Stan got his money, he cashed out and accepted an offer elsewhere. Seemed kinda sketch to be honest and really made me question whether the decision was a good one.
