97% of hardware startups fail, because hardware development is extremely difficult. It's a complex multi-physics problem that most people fail to fully comprehend at the onset of a project; this company is no different. It was founded by a person with zero ground level hands on industry experience in manufacturing, robotics, or semiconductors, and yet those are the very three industries it seeks to revolutionize. In fact, there's no IP that validates the possibility of the long term vision of the company, it's rooted in technologist musings about the potential of nanotechnology (read "Radical Abundance" or "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom"). It's as if Jules Verne had gone to the Wright brothers and said " you boys better seal this thing up, because it's going to the moon some day". Yes, a very smart person conceived of the possibility of this seemingly impossible thing, but they didn't work out how to get there or make it a viable business. That is one of the primary frustrations of an engineer working here: you will constantly be forced to make design choices in service of the 'long term vision' , but there is no high level system diagram, no tech development roadmap to the end goal, or really even a well thought out next step for the system; all due to the fact that the vision for the company had no experiential backing to conceive of the technological complexity that it would actually take to build such a thing. The entire company is based on thought experiments, and as smart as they are, the leaders of this company are much much more confident than they are intelligent. Confidence is a shrewd salesman, caution is a prudent planner. No one flew to the moon on confidence or thought experiments, they flew on the wings of hundreds of thousands of person-hours of cautious de-risking, and sound scientific evidence.
Do you like working nights and weekends? probably not, you will here. Do you like your project being dictated to you to manage the anxiety of someone who doesn't actually understand the problems? probably not. you will here. do you like plastic smiles that will drop you the second you stop being useful? probably not. that's par for the course. If you find yourself reading this, and are still compelled to apply for a job, I implore you: ask as many questions as you can. what is their target market? who is the typical customer? what's the minimum viable product? what's the shortest path to market? what's the total addressable market? What is the core defensible IP that enables the long term vision? BASIC business questions. In addition to this, I would advise on you to record any conversations you have in interviews. A common tactic when pitching at Atomic is 'word soup' . Answering valid questions with rapid multi minute long winded nonsensical answers that have just enough valid points to make you think you agree, but if you slow it down, and think about every point made, it usually falls apart. Question and diligently record everything in the interview process, and you might not have the wool pulled over your eyes. In general, if you are really smart/talented and want a job where you can keep your head down and enjoy great pay and sweet benefits, go for it. But they will work you to the bone, and that gravy train is likely going to come to a hard stop as the company continues to miss deadlines due to fundamental misunderstandings of how to be successful in hardware.
