BulbThings Reviews

- Insane working hours. Expect to work most evenings and most weekends without pay. Having a family life is openly frowned upon by management and at least one person was fired for this reason during my stay. - Unrealistic deadlines, with absolutely no managerial support. Combined with under-sized teams and high-octane turnover, this obviously leads to a very mediocre code base. - As a result, the atmosphere is extremely sinister. Most developers are young and with no experience, and operate permanently at high levels of psychological distress. - Mediocre management with no real experience of startups and how they operate. VERBAL ABUSE IN ALL CAPS seems to be the most prominent communication mode, especially during the overly long and intense "sprints". - Complete misalignment of ambition and means : for example a team can be cut by half and still expected to deliver the same quantity of tech in the same time frame. - Absolutely no coding or even project management methodology. - Company lives on investor money and has barely closed any sale during my stay. This is extremely demoralizing for the team and leads to the impression that the company is fictitious.

- Horrible work-life balance. Everything has to be done for yesterday, always in a rush, always extra hours, sometimes even nights. Management expectations are out of reality for what could be a good product. This creates massive technical debt that is never paid, and affects productivity. - Clients is only priority. Above employees, above the product. This, ironically, creates bad products for your clients. - Infrastructure security or efficiency is never important, just get it done. This can create scalability or worse (security breach) problems in the future. Management does not seem to care about any future for the company. - Old school management. No understanding of how technology works. No talent retainment, every developer is the same, dispensable, interchangeable. No understanding of Agile, no understanding of the importance of refactor or paying technical debt. No understanding that less hours and more motivation and freedom gives productivity, not long hours, frustration, shortcuts and threatening with consequences if deadlines are not met. - Expectations are unrealistic, being the employees the ones to pay when those are not accomplished.