Unique startup experience (for better or worse) - Anonymous employee Airtime Employee Review

3.0
20 Oct 2016
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Airtime has a bold, extremely broad vision that gives engineers lots of challenging spaces to work on. The company's product is an app that juggles six party video chat, plus a youtube video playing, plus a lot of background HTTP polling and server driven events, plus gifs playing. The fact that this incredibly complicated app works on mobile devices at all is a miracle made possible by some really smart people on the team, and by working at Airtime you quickly become one of those smart people. While most startups are forced to limit features because of resource constraints that is less of an issue at Airtime, so it has been possible for the company to build a massive all in one experience that carefully walks that line between convenient and way too bloated. As an engineer you are forced to learn how to build software that doesn't fall apart under its own weight as the complexity increases, and that is a good experience to have. Compensation and perks are quite competitive. In summary Airtime is a great place to be well payed while learning a lot of things really fast, and working on some really tough software problems that will make you a better engineer.

Cons

Leadership. The product leadership has been murky and somewhat directionless for a long time. As an engineer you will build things that are presented as mission critical one moment, and then see them discarded as product chases the next big idea. Additionally there is a toxic environment when it comes to product ideas and critique. If you expect a traditional smaller startup environment where everyone is working together to come up with ideas and make a product that is the shared vision of all in the company then you will be disappointed. Instead the product development is much more top down. Ideas that originate from the "rank and file" are ignored, or actively squashed. This means that engineers generally feel like they are just working for the pay or the technical challenge, without a true passion for the product. Finally, the biggest leadership issue is distrust. There is a sense among many that leadership will say one thing one week, and another the next, or when employees talk to each other they find out that a leader said one thing to one person, and the exact opposite to another person. This lack of consistency leads to big time distrust. Culture. Airtime culture is interesting. High turnover of employees has destabilized things. Most engineers only last a year or so at the company, with a worrying number not even lasting three months. The result is that there is a core clique that is close, but generally culture suffers because why bother trying to build relationships with your coworkers if you aren't sure whether they'll be gone tomorrow? Also if you aren't in the core clique then you will miss a lot of the culture that they have among themselves. The core clique is generally very nice, but they don't have much tolerance for opinionated people, despite the fact that they can be opinionated themselves. This can be intimidating to newcomers. Engineering. The high turnover rate mentioned earlier means you will probably end up working on code that was written by someone that is no longer around to explain it. And depending on which team you join there may be little to no documentation or planning of the software. The API team seems to have a well documented and decently organized system but the app code is much more "organic" and hacked together.

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5.0
22 Feb 2024
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Pros

nice people and open culture

Cons

fast environment and busy workload

2.0
10 Sept 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

Startup culture Like minded Devs Less restrictions on tools

Cons

Company cant make up their mind on products Tons of politics Worse team management

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