Pros
It was a paycheck with benefits
Cons
Culture — performative, not genuine: The culture at FBIN is built almost entirely on marketing language — buzzwords and catchphrases that look good on slide decks but ring hollow the moment you start working there. There is little empathy for employees as people. Leadership seems genuinely indifferent to the products being developed-the products could be replaced with any commodity as long as the financials hold up. Acquired teams that came in with strong cultures have been flattened by a finance-first management style that shows little interest in the product. Pay lags, recognition is inconsistent, and the people actually executing feel invisible. The $18M CEO exit package while contributors went undercompensated wasn't lost on anyone. Branding vs. reality — a growing disconnect: Calling Deerfield the "innovation center" when almost no engineers actually work there is more than a branding misstep — it actively undermines the morale of the engineers who are doing the real work elsewhere. The people responsible for FBIN's actual innovations are made to feel invisible while a location almost entirely made up of operational/business types gets the credit of being the "innovation center". Strategy and Leadership alignment/misalignment: What's particularly frustrating is the pattern of making sweeping decisions without fully stress-testing the outcomes, then scrambling to walk them back once problems surface. The 1HQ initiative is a good example — moving people into a centralized office without genuinely thinking through which roles actually benefit from in-person co-location felt more like a mandate than a strategy. When issues are escalated, they tend to stall rather than get resolved. International teams appear to have been integrated with little consideration for cultural differences, creating unnecessary friction across regions that could have been avoided with basic due diligence. There is a visible tension at the leadership level between what FBIN actually is — a hardware company with a meaningful software component — and the direction leadership appears to be steering toward. Building toward a software-first identity, without the engineering depth or R&D infrastructure to support it, risks misallocating resources away from what the business actually does well. The hyper-focused attention to financials makes product development difficult, increases delivery timelines, and is destroying historical relationships with suppliers due to not paying them in a timely fashion.