Pros
- I was very lucky to have an excellent management chain, as my direct manager and all skip-level superiors were accessible, responded to feedback, and tried to help me whenever they could. I understand that not everyone had this experience, but I did.
- I learned a lot, and am a far better engineer at the end of my tenure than at the start of it. I learned to develop ownership of the things that I built, along with extensive domain knowledge.
- A lot of people complained about work-life balance, and it did get significantly worse in 2024-25, but I actually felt as if I was able to take time for myself. Again likely a function of quality of manager(s), but they were very respectful of my health.
- Amazing engineering team. This is a deeply talented group of people who know their systems inside out, and truly own the things that they are building. I referred a friend here who got selected, and we both enjoyed our time here.
- Zero office politics. There was minimal drama in the team, personalities gelled very well, and many people developed strong, lasting friendships that extended to well outside the office. Merit governed performance assessment, not connections or games.
Cons
- Marketing, Sales, and Product was a joke, full stop. And it's the reason the company went under. The revolving door of CROs & Heads of Sales, each promising the moon, never delivering, wore out the engineering team, with demands for transparency going unanswered. I frankly don't think most of the SEs and sales teams ever understood what made our product stand out, didn't sell it well, and tanked the company.
- There was so little bandwidth in product that engineers doubled as PMs, trying to understand customer needs without any access to actual customers. This is fundamentally the fault of the SDLC at Balbix: the CTO (honestly, too good at his job) became the point-of-contact for customer-facing and internal-facing roles, coordinating everything. I mean, literally everything. And he sure is plenty smart enough to do that, but his time is limited - which chokes feature development, and cuts off access to real customer feedback.
- Many people felt gaslit by leadership by acquisition time. Internal revenue figures were flatly false, we were told that we were on a solid footing, and that was all clearly a lie. The acquiring company is a candidate for the most toxic workplace on planet earth, and leadership failed to protect its best asset - its developers - from that carnage. There is a lot of resentment for that.
- Pay was low. This didn't bother me for most of my time, because I enjoyed my team and liked what I was working on, but it stung more when we realized how badly we were being gaslit about our company finances.