Building the plane while it's taking off but all you have are aluminum foil and duct tape
Pros
- Solid pay. Not sure if this was because I negotiated hard or not - Benefits are pretty standard for tech. No 401k match, but otherwise pretty par for the course - Offices available if you like having the in-person feel, but no requirement to come in if you don't - The company is growing FAST from a business perspective. This is also a con, see below
Cons
- Always-on attitude, so work-life balance is atrocious. Meetings at all hours of the day. One colleague seemed to pride themselves on regularly taking 4am calls. Another had requests to meet at 2am - Absolutely ridiculous levels of burnout. You'd hop into a meeting with someone and ask how they were doing, and they'd sigh and same something like "same stuff, different day," and then brag (?) about working late and over the weekends - Higher leadership micromanagement and oversight. The cofounders are in every Slack channel, and would just pop in with their $0.02 but none of the context. So you'd have to respond (can't leave the CEO hanging) that they were missing critical information and their comment/suggestion either wasn't relevant or would actually make something worse - No documentation/resources at. all. I am not exaggerating. No Confluence, no intranet or company wiki, no externally-facing docs. If you wanted to gather information on something, odds are you'd either have to scour Slack hoping you could find it. If you couldn't and you asked someone, most of the time they'd tell you to "just Glean it." If you needed to provide information or documentation to another party, you had to do it yourself with no assistance from anyone else, and just hope it was good enough (or again, someone would tell you to just Glean it to create what you needed). - Sales hasn't narrowed the scope of customer and doesn't seem to qualify opportunities out, so everyone under the sun can become a customer, even if they're a bad fit, not ready, don't have resourcing, or need a solution more advanced than Doppel can provide. - Because of the above and higher leadership's extreme lean-in, unreasonable expectations get set, both internally and externally. I was in a call when one of the cofounders told a rather large customer that Engineering would turn some extensive feature requests around in UNDER A WEEK. Only one Engineer was tasked to all of this work (adding into the burnout and overwork). - Because of the above, product strategy and roadmap is all over the place. Priorities are constantly shifted, and Product is doing everything they can to create some semblance of a strategic roadmap, but higher leadership will completely derail all of that and move things to the top of the queue because a customer or a prospect asked for it - Very little real strategy. Emphasis on "the next big bet," but it seems like it's just throwing stuff at a wall and hoping some of it sticks - During my time at Doppel, the turnover was UNREAL. I saw employees get fired, but a whole lot more of them left the company after only a few months. Even after leaving the org., I continue to see colleagues switching companies and jumping ship. - Unlimited PTO, but people were too scared to use it because they'd have mountains of work when they came back, presumably because people didn't cover for them (remember that one Engineer who was tasked with all that work I mentioned?). I even saw one person who had vacation scheduled, but then cancelled it the day-of because "it's not a good time to take a break." - Literally when I started working at Doppel, I had people calling me and venting to me about what was going on at the company. Someone unloading on the new kid on the block should have been a huge red flag for me in early days. - Scalability for Doppel is going to be a real problem. They are growing faster than they can keep up with. No documentation. No onboarding materials. No strategic roadmap. Working in Google Sheets for almost everything. They're hiring like wild but don't have steps in place to facilitate new employees, customers, or processes. Cofounders can't let go of the reins. Turnover is constant.
