Axios Reviews

Going by Glassdoor, I'm one of the only people who ever had a bad experience at Axios, which is sort of suspicious not just for the number of positive reviews but also for the number of reviews relative to the organization's size and age. However, I feel that it is necessary to share my experience so that other potential employees might learn from my brief career at Axios and make informed decisions regarding their careers. First, let me say that Axios was my dream job. I thought that being an engineer at Axios would be my ticket to more meaningful work. After all, if I'm writing code, I might as well be writing code for a company I agreed with philosophically. The interview process was pretty typical by tech standards. I had three or four screener interviews, followed by a gauntlet of interviews with the team I'd be working with, followed by a coding test, a few more phone interviews, and finally, I received the job offer. To their credit, the HR team was incredibly receptive to my questions and helped me get prepared for my first day. I started seeing problems on day two or three. The tech stack is painfully outdated. It's the kind of tech stack I would expect from a startup in 2010 (maybe 2015 at the latest). It looks like everything was built with a "get it working as fast as possible" attitude without much consideration for longevity or stability. Consequently, there was always something breaking, needing tweaking, or needing polishing. I don't think I went a day without hearing about some job that miraculously stopped working. They're a startup. I understand that there are many technological growing pains, but at a certain point, most of the issues I was seeing should have already fixed. The onboarding process doesn't seem to have any uniformity across the organization. I'm sure some people have great onboarding experiences at Axios. Axios did a great job of ensuring I met everyone I'd possibly be working with, but a lousy job of making sure I knew what I was doing. I only had two (maybe three) hours of technical training on my calendar as part of orientation. I had to schedule meetings to make sure I was up-to-speed on the tech stack. Most of the people I met with were uninterested in talking to me, which made the entire exercise pointless. I was in meetings a lot during my brief time at Axios. I spent, on average, 6.4 hours a day in meetings during my first two weeks and then an average of 5.2 hours in meetings after that. I don't mind being in meetings if they're productive, but most of these meetings were pointless. We would discuss every possible engineering decision ad nauseam instead of just relying on a qualified engineer to make a decision. Consequently, work was slow because every possible line of code had to be decided by a committee. I'm OK with meetings, but I'm not OK with having my time wasted. Weirdly, Axios seems to know that there are too many meetings but appear to be unwilling to rectify the issue. I left Axios after about a month. During the month I was with Axios I wrote no code, contributed nothing, and still had no real projects. I had no idea what my role was supposed to be or how to evaluate success within my role. All I did for the month I was at Axios was sit in meetings. I had expressed my concerns to my manager multiple times. I had told her that I didn't know what Axios expected of me, what I should be working on, or how my role intersected with other teams. On my last week at the company, I asked my manager, "what should I be doing?" She told me, "I haven't had much time to think about it." Are you kidding me? Did I leave a good stable job for this? I was thrilled to leave Axios. I can say with absolute certainty that going to Axios was a massive mistake. I know this review is a bit long, so let me put it in a more Axios-friendly format (Apologies if it's not perfect. I don't have an expensive piece of software to tell me how to write short concise sentences) What happened: I left a good job for what I thought was going to be my dream job, but it was the worst job I've ever had. Why it matters: Good engineers don't want to make money for doing nothing. The Bottom Line: Serious work needs to be done to ensure that every employee joins the organization with clear projects so that they can hit the ground running.