Pros
free soggy lunch and dinner.
Cons
My hope is that at least one person will read this and be second guess signing to this company. I don't believe any of the other positive reviews written here within the past year is from a person who is not currently in management. A lot of the positive reviews are from over a year ago and the company has changed a lot from then. This place is super stressful. Once I was here, I felt like I was navigating jungles of technical debt left behind by churned engineers. I realized quickly that there were barely any senior managers/engineers. This is not a good place if you are looking for serious mentorship. Many projects were doomed (as a result of mismanagement, bad project specs, not enough time/testing), and when they would fail, someone shortly thereafter gets blamed, yelled at, verbally abused on Slack, fired, or PIP'ed and left with lasting mental trauma. Engineers oftentimes were spontaneously moved to other projects and somehow managers couldn’t understand why a person might not be productive their first week on a different project. If I went one week without hearing someone getting scolded, yelled at, I considered that a lucky week. The atmosphere everyday in the office was palpable. I would get anxious on the commute to work or anytime I got a slack notification on my phone. Management seemed to portray themselves as flexible people. What "flexible" felt like was if management thinks something should be done the same day, in order to survive, you better stay in the office until it's done, even if you are asked right before you are leaving work. Flexible was just a euphemism for irregular hours. Anyone who wasn't with the program might receive profanity laden comments about them being replaceable or useless. Shortly before I left, there was an attitude of if you absent for your desk for more than 10 min, you were slacking and going to be on the shortlist for a PIP next review cycle. It wasn't unheard of for someone to be pushed out before their first performance review (every 6 months). It doesn't help that the management is composed of charlatans who portray themselves as if they were leading the next OpenAI. Technical decisions feel unilateral, taking in little consideration for engineering concerns/opinions. Dissent is met with skepticism and an attitude of "you're probably wrong, but go ahead and try. If it doesn't work, it's your employment on the line." You can tell how long someone has been at the company by how willing they were willing to voice a different opinion. Mileage varied, but eventually everyone breaks. Deadlines proposed by engineers invariably are met with questions about why the task proposed can’t be done in a fraction of the time estimated. Frankly, managers were unqualified and did not seem to understand the technicalities of what they wanted from engineers. Somehow managers would expect us to implement some highly technical design or research paper in a week, but if you ask them how they thought it worked, they would be clueless. Explaining time estimates felt like talking to a wall. If you are reading this, especially if you are on a visa or an international student, and you are considering working here, you should seriously reconsider accepting your offer. If I were to go back in time, I would’ve chosen being unemployed and taking a little more time to find employment elsewhere.