Company with no backbone - Senior Java Developer Lab49 Employee Review

- Working groups around Blockchain, AI, and other interesting topics - Book Club - Open and transparent leadership team

- Uncertainty around what you will be working - Can do a great job on a project, and still be left on the bench when it is finished

Hiring is well-gated, so you'll work with smart people. Projects are exclusively in finance so it's a great place to gain exposure in that industry. You operate with a good amount of autonomy.

It's a consulting company, so engineers are only valuable if they're billable. That means your success is tied to someone else's ability to secure a pipeline of work for you, or your own ability to upsell at your engagement - which may or may not be up to you no matter what you do. There isn't a dedicated sales team at Lab, so this can get spotty. Upper management's presence is felt in seasons - non-existant for months at a time, all over everything the next. They were nowhere to be found as AI got rolled out massively in 2026 and we got caught without a strategy and action plan - either for leveraging internally or for pivoting our model.