Good people, average product, plagued with inexperience, and horrible leadership
Pros
- Most of the employees are really friendly. There was a soccer league that many of the employees were in, and it was common for people to get drinks after work. Many people from the early employees are close friends. - If you have little engineering experience, you probably can get more responsibility than a larger company. Many engineers that work/worked on machine learning don't have PhDs and some just have undergraduate degrees. - They've had a ton of growth, and the sales team seems to be top notch. Constantly closing deals and being in competition with large corporations. - They'll give you as much work as you want! If you are a "go-getter" and want to put in a ton of work and push yourself, you're able to work on things you want. - Startups are very exciting since there is so much work to do. - They seem pretty flexible for their interns, I believe some of the interns even interned during the school year part time. - Ann Arbor is a great place to work and the office is in a good location - The CEO is very charismatic and a good salesman for that reason - Many employees are deeply invested in the company - Catered lunch on fridays - Snacks
Cons
- Horrific leadership. Not uncommon to hear some of the founders (CEO, COO, etc) screaming profanities and other gross and just inappropriate things at employees. Many of the major roadblocks the company faced came as a result of the founders lack of vision and just inexperience. Many of the founding members have never worked at a large company (or any company EVER) and have worked solely in academia , and it definitely shows when watching them try to develop a good work environment, make strategic decisions, hire, etc. Frankly, they also seemed greedy. Many of the choices they made really seemed to be for short term financial gain rather than long term success. This reflected in many of the "speeches" the CEO gives during the All Hands Meeting. They're the type are probably spending more time reading reviews on glassdoor, trying to figure out who is writing all of the negative reviews rather than improve their performance. - Engineering leadership is extremely inexperienced. This isn't the engineer's fault (a ton of good people trying their best), but it exceeds the normal amounts of inexperience that come with a startup. There's are almost no real senior engineers, and no real engineering managers. I'd say far less than half of the team leads would qualify as senior engineers at a FAANG company, most of the team leads are new grads with a couple years of experience working on their team. As a result the stack is a mess and developing as an engineer is difficult. There's no formal way to progress, and no engineering manager to manage expectations or monitor progress. - Overworked. People are over worked. This is understandable in a startup, but it's beyond the normal expectations. - There have been cases of people being fired out of no where, after only a couple months of work. Founders said they had to "trim fat" but I feel like they were capable, just suffered as a result of the disorganization, confusing code stack, etc. - I do not believe in the product - As a final note. Many of the awesome and "exciting" reviews come from the fact that the majority of the company has not held a job before this one. A lot of the new grads are given responsibilities outside their abilities and become deeply invested which makes it "exciting." In reality they're kinda being taken advantage of, and don't really know better since they've never worked at a major tech company or even a more organized startup.