Pros
I had a lot of breadth and exposure in my role Got a lot of control in certain things The problem Grid is trying to solve is genuinely interesting
Cons
Is everything else an option? From an egotistical man-child of a CEO who does whatever he wants on a whim, to a dysfunctional leadership team, and everything in between. The engineering manager loves belittling employees publicly in some futile effort to assert dominance. I have many shocking stories of how the culture is, but in an effort to conceal my identity, I will not share them here. The fact that I feel the need to conceal my identity on this review should speak enough about the levels the management team stoops to. Oh, and they never followed through with promised compensation increases , team size increases, and many other things. Multiple people were continuously kneecapped in performance and verbally gaslighted to keep them in lower expertise levels so they didn't have to pay a higher salary, but they for sure were given job requirements of senior or staff level people. Why was the only guy working on the entire iphone app labeled as a junior developer, even though he led major projects and led large architectural decisions and implementations? Why were people with MBAs and masters in finance and accounting spending 100% of their time answering customer support tickets and getting belittled directly by the CEO at all hands meetings whenever he noticed some small issue in some insignificant model? The most recent story I've heard come out of Grid, verified by multiple sources, was that a business manager was given a project that was outside his domain, and was commonly known as the 'lemon' project by the CEO. He actually somehow pulled it off with some degree of success, and while he took a week vacation, the engineering team botched the implementation, but since the engineering manager is buddy-buddy with the CEO, the business manager came back to a metaphorical pink slip on his desk. The management team is more interested in playing mind games with the employees rather than actually building great products. Double standards left and right. Come in to the office or get fired, while the CEO and his buddies stayed at home for 6 months longer. Renting a terrible office and parading it around as "trying to live like our customers", and not what it really is, the CEO not wanting to spend a cent more than he needs to on his employees. We were in SF, then he moved us to Oakland on a whim, conveniently after her moved to Walnut Creek. Then he cut our companied supplied lunches, because we were given a $250 per month stipend on the recently launched credit card. Well, now on top of the lunch cap lowering from $15 to $12.50 per day, now we had to either pay for BART, or pay for bridge tolls and parking on top of that. Just sleazy. Just stay away from this company. The only value I got is an understanding of what to avoid, and some great friends and professional connections from the many people that passed through the revolving sh*tshow that is called Grid. Sorry for the word-vomit, I just wanted to clear my mind and get my thoughts out as quickly as possible.