Heavy on internal and external campaigning, light on employee appreciation or experienced leadership - Anonymous employee Proteus Digital Health Employee Review

Pay is medicore, there is no bonus structure, no 401K matching, ungenerous PTO, paltry raises, long and often stressful hours, and wide-open seating where people must wear headphones or earplugs if they don't want to be distracted by nearby conversations. With such little to offer as tangible incentive, Proteus offers some small stock option grants and boasts they'll be a multi-billion dollar company one day. Meanwhile, they're a long way from being in the black as their ingestible sensor product, or more like product concept, continues to change shape, has little clinical data behind it, is expensive to make, clumsy to use, and is fraught with technical challenges. Management core is comprised of a close-knit, almost fraternal group of individuals that have been working at Proteus for several years to a decade. Few have any real experience outside of this perpetual startup environment. As the company grows, this shows up in lack of appreciation for outsiders, impersonal people managers, chaotic timelines, fear of change, wasted resources, and junior-level mistakes by high-level individuals. Internal evangelism and self-promotion is high, almost cultish: large TV screens throughout showing barbara walters style interviews of managers on continuous playback, company-wide emails celebrating the latest recipient of the obligatory weekly award and the ensuing chain of reply-all hoorays, frequent all hands meetings with managers declaring their love for the company or hamming it up on stage to a spectacle of video and dj music, holiday parties that serve more as a formal stage for propaganda speeches than as an enjoyable time for employees to get to know each other, and walls decorated with founder slogans and catch phrases. While the concept of an ingestible sensor is cutting edge, the manufacturing process is anything but. The sensor is basically just a small microchip. The process to make it is very similar to any other traditional silicon-chip industry of the last 20 years except with the added bureaucracy of FDA regulation. Another big part of the business focuses on data-trending, patient monitoring software applications for mobile devices. Mildly interesting, but many would rather be programming games, line of business apps, or social media apps. And again, there is the documentation-heavy overhead of FDA regulation.