Avoid at All Costs If You Value Stability, Growth, and Job Security
Pros
- Almost no processes, approvals, documentation, or governance to slow you down. If you enjoy operating in complete chaos and figuring things out as you go, you'll feel right at home. - Great place to learn how to operate under constant pressure and uncertainty. - Small office means you'll always be close to your colleagues, sometimes literally.
Cons
- Almost no mature engineering processes in place. The company operates in a constant state of urgency. - One of the worst code quality i have seen, no PR reviews. The deployment process is one of the most chaotic I have seen. What should be a routine release often turns into a troubleshooting exercise, followed by a stream of hotfixes. - The company is so cheap that even basic engineering tools like Postman are apparently too expensive for them. - Job security is non-existent. Layoffs are common enough that employees regularly question whether they'll still have a job in a few months. The oldest employee in the India engineering team was only around 7-8 months old because many earlier employees had already been laid off. - There is not even a dedicated full-time HR, they depends on interns for such roles. - The India office is extremely small for the number of people expected to work from it. Around fifteen employees are packed into a space that feels more like a storage room than a software engineering office. - ESOPs are heavily emphasized during hiring, but there is very little transparency around valuation, FMV, or how employees can independently track and manage their grants. - Engineering growth is limited. Architecture, technical direction, and key decisions are controlled by a small group of people outside India. Most engineers are expected to focus on implementation and AI-generated code rather than system design, architecture, or technical leadership. - Work-life balance is poor. Employees are expected to accommodate European schedules, and meetings outside normal Indian working hours are treated as normal. - Unlimited leave sounds great during hiring but it is practically a scam, you won't get approval for leave. Even national and public holidays are not respected as actual holidays, and employees are expected to work as usual. - If you are coming from a stable organization with established processes, engineering standards, and career growth, this company will likely feel like a major step backward. - Be skeptical of extremely 5 star reviews. The company hires interns and junior engineers in large numbers, and their experience can be very different from that of experienced engineers who join expecting long-term career growth and stability.