Pros
I’ve felt conflicted, back and forth about leaving this review. Some time passed since leaving so I’m in a more suitable state of mind to write this review. There are many positive traits about Forem. The team is remote and distributed, has flexible time off, good benefits, tries to be asynchronous but often fails. And the people are very nice. I can only speak for the people I worked with, mostly other developers, but it’s a company value.
Cons
However the big cons outdo the pros. The founders are incompetent when it comes to management, envisioning a product and business that makes any sense, and executing. They never worked at an actual company before and it shows. The consequences of this are passed down to the employees. 1. Below market compensation and modest equity that will likely never pay off. If you’re a senior dev, you’ll do far better financially elsewhere for less work and headache. 2. A product with huge issues that nobody seems to want after years of development, and no roadmap to get there because nobody thinks clearly. This all comes with crazy customer expectations and product development timelines. 3. Regularly throwing out weeks of work due to lack of coherent vision between the founders, product management, and a low quality group of managers more interested in playing politics and raising their own stock doing dumb pointless organization tasks instead of chipping in and doing the actual work. I can’t make this point any clearer. Grandiose ideas get tossed around casually by leadership in meetings that don’t make any sense and then get scrapped after we’ve already spent weeks working on them. 4. And fundraising seems unstable? Not sure we get any real transparency on this, concerning given everything I’ve said so far.