Pros
Great work/life balance, decent pay/benefits (though not exceptional), flexible WFH schedule, office snacks, potential for career advancement, most colleagues are friendly and easy to work with
Cons
Sphera is a typical workplace masquerading as a progressive startup. The casual office culture, breakroom kegerator, and youthfulness of the rank and file disguise a c-suite utterly devoid of diversity, both in thought and representation. While Sphera is happy to fill out functional and middle-management positions with POC and women, executive leadership is comprised almost entirely of middle-aged white men, save for one woman. When publicly confronted with this reality by an employee, the ELT went on to do exactly nothing and the employee quit. Other red flags: a CTO who is completely detached from the product line and development teams, well established cliques throughout the office, the outside sales department is a revolving door of poorly paid and overworked recent college grads, and I personally witnessed the office administrator publicly berate or insult employees on multiple occasions. For the sake of transparency, I was let go as a result of layoffs but have waited to collect my thoughts to remove emotion from my review, as much as that's possible. I understand that layoffs are an unavoidable reality, but there is a way to approach them with dignity and respect for those losing their jobs, and then there's how Sphera did it. The way in which Sphera leadership handled the layoffs preceding the Blackstone acquisition was callused, cowardly, and frankly shameful. As CEO, Paul Marushka should be ashamed by how poorly he treated the employees who built Sphera and helped attain the 1.4 billion dollar valuation they've touted so proudly. It's one thing to lay off employees, it's another thing to give them a paltry severance (less than a month's pay for many), try to gyp them out of owed vacation pay, and intentionally time the layoff announcement so that their healthcare benefits expire only 7 days after being notified just to squeeze a few more dollars out of the acquisition. Sphera’s leadership could have done better for their people but chose not to.