Amazing place to work - Market Analyst Chefables Employee Review

Work life balance is prioritized. Development team is autonomous and all levels of input are respected regardless of seniority at all levels up to CEO. Latitude in technologies leveraged to complete tasks is left up to the developer. Growth is only "capped" by the individual employee. **To Address other reviews** Disgruntled employees tend to twist narratives to fit their reason of leaving. As the lead of the technical team, I can attest that the review left by the developer who left after 6 months; is only partially accurate. Feel free to find me on LinkedIn if you have concerns regarding employment in Chefables Technical team, and I will clear up any concerns left by previous employees.

Deadlines are fair but strict, your deadlines are agreed upon prior to a sprint and you're expected to complete your tasks prior to deadline.

- No coding test during the interview process - Development team was patient, eager to help with problems

Everything went smoothly in the interviews. Everyone was punctual and polite, I felt like I clicked with with the people there, and there were no real red flags. The first sign something was off happened on my first day. I met one of the other developers outside the building, shook hands, was let in, and discovered the office I'd be working in was actually...a warehouse with no people in it. In the initial interview I was told I'd have my own office, so imagine expecting to walk into, well...a normal office, and instead you're in an industrial building that's completely empty except for (sometimes) one other person. For much of my time here (three out of five days a week), I worked in this warehouse completely alone, connecting with the other team members over Zoom (something I could have done from home). When I asked about the reasoning behind having to commute over an hour each way to sit alone in an empty building, I was told about a previous developer at the company who had been "dishonest". Since that person left, new hires were made to come in for an indeterminate amount of time so their comings and goings could be monitored via the burglar alarm logs to "make sure they were working". This leads me to the second big problem. In the screening interview with Chefables, I pointed out that the posting said it was a hybrid position and asked how long the job would be in-person. I was told I'd need to be in person for 60-90 days, then I could transition to remote. I was assured they were very flexible on the WFH schedule, and was told "if you want something, just ask for it". I knew the commute to the office was long (a 3 hour round trip), but I figured I could stick it out for a few months. On my second day, I was told the information I'd been given in the screening interview was a "mistake", and that the job was in-person indefinitely. In the exit interview, I was told I'd misheard what the screening interviewer had said, even though the person telling me this wasn't present in the screening interview. I will say that they gave me one work from home day a week within the first two or so months, but this was still far different from what I expected given the conversation I had in the screening interview. The incident that made me decide to leave happened right before a holiday. Our team was doing some pre-work for a sprint, and things were not going well. A lot of code had been changed in a short time and merged into prod, and it was causing problems that prevented us from working on what we needed to for the sprint. At some point that day, my boss texted me and said we had to wrap up the pre-work we were doing by the end of the week, otherwise we wouldn't be able to have the holiday off. This was three days before the holiday weekend, I had a trip booked, plane tickets, plans with friends in another city, etc. The work ended up getting done and we got to have the holiday, but the threat itself made me so upset that I began putting out applications that day. This company's benefits are not great in the first place, so for them to try and take away a holiday on three days' notice was more than I was willing to put up with. By the end of the month, I'd found another developer job. Oh, and the code. Chefables software was developed by a small team, and the business logic behind it is incredibly complex. The main goal was to create an MVP. As a consequence, there is virtually no automated testing in the codebase. Whenever anything in the system changes, it's up to the person doing the changes to know what pieces of code might be affected, and to test all those places accordingly. The developers I worked with were very capable, smart, and patient, but no human can remember every point of failure in such a complex system. This was a huge stumbling block in my day-to-day work and made it very difficult to learn the codebase. Tips to avoid going through what I did: - Whatever they tell you in the interview, get it in writing. I cannot stress this enough. Working from home, the start of your health insurance, or whatever else you manage to negotiate--get some sort of contract or written agreement. - Request a copy of the employee handbook in the initial interview so you can see what the company's benefits and policies are. They were not very forthcoming when I asked about specific benefits in the interviews, and I wish I would have pressed harder. - Ask to see the office and where you'll be working, even if it's just someone picking up their computer and taking you around on Zoom. I'm serious. If I'd known before I started that the office was an empty warehouse, I would have bailed before the technical interview. - Ask why the previous developers left. As I said in the title, at the time of this writing, three developers have left this company within the span of about 5 months. Two of those developers lasted less than five months. I'm writing this because there were no red flags in the interviews, I had no one to warn me, and I found this company dishonest in my dealings with them. This is not a criticism of the developers or the dev team, but of the company itself. I wouldn't wish this experience on any other developer, and I wish I'd had a review like this when I first applied here--it would have saved me a lot of trouble.