Pros
The work schedule is flexible (depending on your manager). They give a decent starting salary. The work itself is interesting.
Cons
Sr Management lies to customers about product capabilities/delivery dates (they come back from meetings with customers laughing, "well, we got caught in another lie ...") Sr Management ignore advice from interviewing engineers and hire cronies with little to no tech/sales knowledge for $100k+ salaries and award promotions and raises to yes-men more often than to people who produce. In the last year the entire support team has either quit (4) or moved to different groups (2). How can they support a product with a team that has no more than 9 months experience? In addition to the support team attrition the QA and Product Design managers quit, several test and design engineers, the IT engineer, two sales VPs and the technical sales support engineer all quit. That's in the past year. In a 50-55 person company. Every year the benefits get worse and worse. There is no 401k match and the health plan is more than $6k high deductible. There really is no possibility for advancement. If you are looking for a career-building job, look elsewhere. There have been so many rounds of funding the few options held by engineers can't amount to even a year's salary even if the company were ever bought out. Forget the $1-2mil pipe dream we were sold when hiring on. It's a startup in the middle of it's 7th year and is still not making enough in a year to pay 25% of it's expenses - how much longer will investors give money while the product doesn't sell?
