Pros
* Very intelligent coworkers (all-star blueprint hiring plan at work) * Cool office * A mission you can get behind * Solid tech stack
Cons
Tempus looks a lot like an MBA case study in the making. We're not going full Elizabeth Holmes here, but there are serious concerns that should give you pause over calling this your place of work. I would encourage you to heavily cross-section these key elements as you progress through your interviews with the company. *The middle management is extremely weak.* Perhaps it varies by team, but the management culture at Tempus seems consistently poor. I see the extremes of managers who are overbearing to the point of treating their direct reports like children (seriously, counting bathroom breaks for someone in a white-collar role) to managers not even knowing what their reports are doing over the span of weeks. If you take the average manager, I suppose you'll be happy, but unfortunately, managers acting somewhere in between these two extremes were something I failed to observe. *Knowledge is siloed.* If you go to Tempus expecting to make strong connections and work with people in other teams, prepare to be disappointed. There is no knowledge transfer between teams outside of occasional demo days. I'd like to chalk this up to most people being too focused on their day to day tasks. Unfortunately, unless you work on a project that requires it, you're not going to get to know many of the talented people in the room. Moreover, if you have a skill set that overlaps across teams, it will probably go untapped. It is a feature of the teams at Tempus to avoid cross-functional dependency at all costs. *Performance is not actually evaluated.* You can be the top performer at Tempus or the bottom of the barrel and the only thing you take away for being the former is your pride. I witnessed several cases of underperformance that were allowed to persist with no marked improvement or consequence. Why will you be motivated to go to work when you see tolerance for people who aren't there to work with you? *The incentive structure is lacking to reward strong performers.* The equity is a magic number (you have no idea what the shares are worth and HR will not confirm it for you). Keep in mind that the thousands of shares you're awarded could be worth very little without knowing how many are outstanding. There is no formal bonus structure (I assume this changes as you approach the top of the org chart though). Performance reviews are given annually, but there is only a weak form of career progression with fuzzy criteria towards promotion. As other reviews note, expect to be happy with the compensation in your initial offer for quite some time.
