Pros
- Camaraderie with coworkers; “at least we suffer together” mentality with close peers;
Cons
Product & Leadership - Leadership team is willing to lie about what the product can do, how many customers it has, and how much money they make to hire candidates, gain new customers, and keep the board happy. - The product is literally a bunch of custom python rules on top of OCR’d text from open source OCR providers; Very concerning ego-driven CEO behavior with no motivation to change or grow. - CEO has said there aren’t enough women in senior positions out there to be considered and hired into senior roles and leadership positions at Instabase; - CEO said that George Floyd’s murder was a political event and that he wouldn’t denounce racism in the US; this had a lot of backlash and then he reverted his statement, wrote a blog post about it, then blamed his behavior on his upbringing in India and lack of education on systemic racism in the US; - CEO is very conflict avoidant and an irrational competitive person which results in him saying yes to every customer request and the Instabase engineering and product teams then scramble to build one off, single use, random products with no future use; Work/Life Balance and Compensation - Lower than industry standards for compensation and benefits - this has made it very hard to recruit engineering talent; - Very high churn with employees and customers; +10% of the ~100 person company has left in the first 3 months of 2021; customers continue to downsize their spend with Instabase; - Raises happen non-transparently/promotions are never celebrated publicly. You have to guess what you need to do to get a raise or promotion (which seems to be working 80 hrs/week or more)