Pros
- Salary WAS good - CEO was in no hurry to find market fit, which could be a plus if you were a dev who liked working on new stuff all the time
Cons
I'm surprised to see so few negative reviews from the layoffs that happened at the end of 2022. The CEO, after saying our industry was "recession-proof", decided to lay off ~80% of the company over two layoffs in October and November. And I do mean "decided" - the company is entirely funded by him, nothing about the product or the underlying economic situation made it so that he needed to do huge layoffs with minimal severance right before the holidays, and he offered no explanation as to why he felt like he needed to do it. His explanation at the time was that "Our company has 7-8 unsuccessful products and we need to focus on the 1-2 that have a chance of being profitable." Which is true! But that was also his decision - we did not look for market fit (or even really do any market research) for YEARS because this company is the CEO's hobby/passion project and he wanted to build things he was interested in first, then find a market fit later. So when he wasn't interested in this hobby anymore, he chose to upend a few dozen peoples' lives right before the holidays and tossed us into one of the most challenging tech job markets in a decade or two. He also did not pay out accrued vacation to those of us laid off, despite that being explicitly outlined in our contracts. The explanation was that our (small) severance was "in lieu of" paying out accrued vacation. The CEO is a very charming man, and is good at convincing you he cares - he's one of those guys where people were comforting HIM while he was making the layoff announcement because he "felt so bad about it". But he didn't feel bad enough to tell us the truth about the state of the company, or give decent severance pay, or even delay the layoffs for 6 weeks or so to get us through the holidays. A great time to join this company would have been two years ago! Those times aren't coming back.