Pros
- Smart folks at all levels of the company to learn from and share with. - Dynamic environment (acquisitions, strategical changes...), resulting in high impact, challenging projects and space to have high impact on the business. - Career growth opportunities, great work is rewarded by promotions. - Flexible hybrid/remote and work hours.
Cons
- Closed culture: Process/work documentation culture is the opposite of companies who have a public handbook (e.g. Gitlab). Everything is closed by default and permissions owners are often reluctant to open things up. This creates silos and hinders cross department collaboration. - EPD/rest of business split: A major architectural flaw for a wannabe "AI company". Engineering/Product/Design and business function as two companies in the company. Engineering time is exclusively spent on customer facing work. As ISD/IT doesn't have the needed engineering excellence center, this leads to business functions not getting the engineering/tech support they need to achieve the best business outcomes. It forces them to turn to a combination of enterprise SaaS tools and consulting. This default solution barely masks the underlying organisational/process defects and increases our bottomline. - Cross department frictions: Lack of transparency and empathy between departments leads to conflicts that slow down progress. It can also be hard to have Radically Candid relationships with some peers and senior leaders. - Toxic Management: While I haven't witnessed this in my own team/department, I have seen several instances of low performers not given the care they need, and sometimes being protected by their managers due to being "friends" with them. - Double Speech: Company OKRs aim for being an elite AI company while salary bands were reduced to the 50% percentile. Median compensation will tend to bring median talent, not top. Besides, I observed a widespread title inflation practice as it's often the only way to fairly reward top performers.
