Pros
- Fantastic talent and friendly people (that they have begun to lose quickly). This was Afresh's most valuable resource bar none and they are losing it very fast. I cannot stress how great on average my coworkers were here. Incredibly intelligent, kind, and friendly people that were driven by an honorable mission at a dreamlike intersection of tech, market position, and social good (mitigating climate change through reducing food waste). - Healthy Engineering culture, plenty of opportunity for cross-collaboration. - Solid core product that's an easy sell - Great insurance and compensation for a startup but with room for improvement - Meaningful impact on the climate with lots of potential, can directly point to millions of pounds of food not gone to waste thanks entirely to Afresh
Cons
- Constant and completely sudden layoffs over 2023, technical headcount has shrunk substantially. No thought given to planning or consideration of impact on the rest of the company through any of these re-orgs, teams often left scrambling to pick up the pieces for weeks after and there has been no warning for any of these re-orgs. !!! - Poor long term outlook which is critical when evaluating working at a startup and a must-read for anyone interested in working at Afresh (2 main parts) : 1. Latest round of layoffs in 2023 led to dissolving the engineering org who's main initiative was to launch the company's next actual product and make a big impact on its mission to end food waste. That's certainly not happening anymore. 2. Existentially important contracts are in jeopardy due to outside factors but leadership's first response is to immediately gut engineering teams with knives out and with absolutely no warning on a random Monday. Most of those affected got a couple months severance and COBRA insurance through the end of the year as a paltry package. 3. Incredibly important product pilot with yet another existentially important contract is on the horizon for early 2024, and rather than pivot engineering teams to focus on building features to win them over they laid them off. Instead leadership has decided to keep hiring superfluous support staff who end up accomplishing nothing more than adding more cooks to the kitchen during incidents. There is now only scarce engineering headcount left for less important experimental initiatives. Make it make sense leadership. - Chaotic decision making from the top-level, priorities shift quickly and are dropped before they can be fulfilled. My team had a long list of half-measures and partially completed projects because we'd be constantly yanked in a new direction every quarter. Had the company simply stuck to a set of given initiatives for even a single year, they'd be in much better shape. - Unhealthy approach to agility, related to above point. Leadership seems to mistake the ability for the company to pivot on its focuses quickly (which it can do very well thanks to herculean effort from ICs) to mean that they SHOULD pivot often which is absolutely not true. - Took way too long to release another product and major feature beyond the core platform and the planning for supporting those new products afterward seemed non-existent. This happened mainly because of the above points. - Engineering strain and burdensome on-call has become the norm. Teams are expected to do the work of a team 2x to 3x their size and prepare major features, re-writes, migrations, and maintenance with even less headcount than they had which is ridiculous given most engineering teams were running quite lean to begin with. - Continuing from the above point, its very clear that leadership is taking advantage of the historically bad tech job market to crack the whip on engineers to overwork to keep their jobs, lest they be the next victims of yet another round of layoffs. - Benefits have been cut back in a big way. The wellness and grocery stipends are no more, the already paltry team-building budgets have been slashed, professional development budgets used for learning resources and travel to conferences has been greatly cut back, and the company has stopped giving regular raises. - All the above and yet for some nebulous reason, leadership still insists on wasting millions of critical runway/funds to fly out the entire company to HQ for what amounts to a weeklong San Francisco field trip twice a year (now reduced to one). Had leadership put it to a vote whether they should completely cut the Fall season Afreshfest celebration and the spring season HQ planning visit and instead keep most engineers that were lost in the 2023 layoffs, or keep the aforementioned benefits and go ahead with the re-org and layoff dozens its so obvious what we would've chosen I don't even have to type it out for you, dear reader. The company's frontline is largely seasoned 5-7+ YOE vets of the tech industry. We would've much rather gritted our teeth and beared cutting back benefits and the HQ visits and even a flat compensation cut of 10-20% like what often happened in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis rather than what they did do which was gut engineering and force us to say goodbye to our trusted colleagues and what was once a dreamlike workplace. - Lastly, the canaries in the coalmine I wish I spotted. We had several incredibly important staff engineers including founding engineers leave abruptly from late 2022 through mid 2023. This should've been the signal to me that was something was wrong, that people would leave amidst the worst tech job market in living memory. Several got poached by other top tier companies such as OpenAI and Airbnb, others simply left of their own accord. I see now that they saw the dysfunctional pattern of behavior and knew what was coming and got out when they could. - Not only were engineers leaving, several people in leadership left too and the top-level felt like a revolving door for quite a while.