Pros
Nearly all of the engineering teams at IO are filled with extremely talented, hard-working, kind people. There is a strong culture of doing things correctly the first time and thinking things through. There is also a strong culture of learning and improving. Additionally, the collaborative relationship between the engineers and the researchers is amazing.
Cons
As soon as you leave the bubble of engineering at IO and have to interact with the executives, you enter a viscous world of everyone backstabbing everyone else for Charles' favor. The hostility start with Charles, the CEO. He cares only about himself, his reputation, and his money, and will harm as many people as it takes to get what he wants. He is a cutthroat manipulator who has made himself enormously wealthy by deceiving people. When he wants something from you, he is your best friend and makes you feel wonderful. But this is contrasted with constant temper tantrums in company meetings, where he shouts and yells and belittles people. People are fired on the spot the second Charles does not like what someone says. An easy way to get fired is to call Charles out for one of his many lies. While Charles' himself is actually quite informed about blockchain, none of his executives are. They exist only to feed Charles' ego and to do his dirty work. The worst part is that there are absolutely no checks and balances to Charles' whims. He rules with absolute authority and everyone is afraid of him. (Jeremy Wood provided some counter-balance in the early days of the company, but was bought out.) Here are some illustrative examples: - Charles has been known to brag about how little you have to pay a Haskell developer, since they are willing to take a pay cut to write Haskell. Moreover, he brags that you can get folks from Eastern Europe for very cheap. - One time, for a company meeting, the executives had a video produced to surprise Charles. The video took the "Alexander Hamilton" song from the famous musical, and made it all about Charles ("what's my name, Charles Hoskinson", etc). It was high production, they must have spent a lot of money on it. It was the most sycophantic (and cringe) thing I have ever seen. - Charles has knowingly forced engineering to release software with known bugs in it, because he doesn't want Twitter to make fun of him about pushing release dates back. And he constantly makes promises on Twitter that are completely impossible to fulfill. - Charles flaunts his wealth over and over. - None of the executives will talk openly and honestly about the start of IOG, when Cardano was marketed in Japan as a blockchain gambling platform, and Charles was sold as a genius mathematician.