Pros
Benefits and entry level pay are pretty good. Diverse team full of incredibly smart and driven individuals.
Cons
Executives are very obviously beholden to VC investors and behave as such. Short term profitability is prioritized over long term growth and the way they’ve putting all of their eggs in the AI basket demonstrates this. The AI bubble will pop, as did the housing bubble of 06 and the dot com bubble of the 90s and it will take AI companies with it. Because Handshake isn’t creating their own AI model, but rather training models for other companies, there will probably be a delayed impact to the bubble bursting… but there will be an impact nonetheless when the companies hiring Handshake to train their models go under and take their contracts with them. When that happens Garrett & friends as well as their VC investors will cash out and run, leaving lots of Handshakers to deal with the impact. Hope I’m wrong, but uI don’t believe I am. Promotions are few and far between. New teammates are brought on for 6 month contracts and are seldom converted to full time. Even once converted to full time, job stability does not exist. One round of layoffs was just done and everyone is on edge expecting more. Self service product is misleading about its payment structure and cancellation process. Having to defend it when customers reach out about unexpected billing feels unethical. Thoughtless implementation of AI into every workflow has led to a decrease in efficiency, especially around triaging and reporting bugs. Platform-breaking bugs would occur weekly or even multiple times per week. Every newly shipped feature had “unexpected” downstream consequences on other features. Middle management (VP level) was somehow simultaneously entirely detached from the work we were doing while also micromanaging cherry-picked metrics that don’t accurately measure performance.