1) Pay will be lower here than what you can get elsewhere.
2) A lot of your coworkers will be drunk frequently both inside and outside the office. This includes Senior Leadership, Directors, VPs, etc. You will see people in leadership positions get drunk and do stupid things. Sometimes it will be funny, sometimes it will get the company sued. You may see them acting inappropriately around women. If you’re popular you’ll be invited to bars, casinos, concerts and more by popular people (everyone in Leadership is a popular person). You should go.
3)"Critical information" will disseminate in bars instead of formally. If you have a family or friends outside of work, expect to know less than the popular crowd. This can include: what clients are being pursued, what projects at going poorly, and who's about to get fired.
4) On the topic of firing, tons of people have been let go in the past 3 months. In one fell swoop our CEO resigned and ~13 people were fired without warning. Offices outside of our Charlotte headquarters were hit hardest. Employees weren't told who was let go and discovered who was terminated based on deactivated Slack accounts. Of course, people in the popular crowd knew weeks before. If you go to bars, you'll learn things. If you don't, you'll be left behind.
4.a) Outside of the mass firing, a disturbingly high number of people have been let go recently. If a client chooses to stop buying Levvel someone ends up taking the fall. On the other hand, I've personally seen an employee who didn’t get along with his manager get fired even though the client liked him. Popularity will keep you safe from the chopping block, competence will not. Go to bars.
5) None of the managers have managed people before. That sounds like a joke, but it isn't. Levvel took a handful of software developers, held weekly meetings with them where they talked about leadership, made them read a book or two and appointed them managers. They handle pay, titles, hiring and firing etc. They have virtually no adult supervision. If there is any truth to Levvel being a cult, then our newly minted managers are gulping the FlavorAid. Expect to hear a mixture of insanity and incompetence whenever you speak with one. If you need to know what's really going on, ignore meetings with your manager and go to bars.
6) We're not profitable.
6.a) We've been burning through a lot of investor money working on unprofitable contracts and going to bars on the company dime. There's a tinge of desperation now; it's been there since the CEO change. We announce and get excited for clients we haven't landed yet. I'm worried for what will happen if we don't land one of the major leads we're already celebrating, I think more "firings" (lay-offs?) may result.
6.b) Do to pressures to become profitable you'll hear and see things that seem unethical. This can include being asked to tell a client that you're a Sr Java developer despite having never worked in Java or any other back-end technology. Or it could mean hearing that your coworker is simultaneously working on projects for two different clients at once and billing 40 hours a week for both.
7) It is possible that you'll be put on a long running project that requires you to be in a client site for well over a year. You may find yourself doing staff-aug QA work despite being a developer. You'll be asked, point blank, to work insane hours doing manual QA so that an arbitrary client deadline gets hit. You may be the only Levvel employee around. You'll have a Levvel manager who you'll only see on a 20 minute video call every 2-3 weeks. You'll have a separate client manager (remember you're staff aug and the client will need to manage you). Don't be surprised if the to separate chains of command you report to don't see eye to eye, or if they're openly hostile to one another. Your skills will atrophy. You will get no respect from the client or from Levvel.
