Pros
Normative is trying to save the world by solving the climate crisis. It's a very value-driven company and I really liked that there was a strong focus on _reducing_ carbon emissions, not just estimating it.
Cons
The company didn't fit me very well. There were too many role silos for an engineer. For example, engineers were not invited to partake in the decisions/discussions where the product was heading. This led to some unrealistic product features being built. I wasn't particularly happy about the product. It was targeted more towards expert users (which is why I think it wasn't self-signup). I think the fact that the company had so many internal expert users made it impossible for the product to become simple enough for external users to use. Feedback culture was subpar, CTO was rather micromanaging, and all former Spotify managers left one after another due to culture misalignment. The company has a strict dev and ops split (there is an "Operations department"), so if you want a DevOps culture this company is not for you. Tech-wise the company has made some significant improvement to tech debt. That said, I found the company to mostly be a playground for frontenders and _very_ TypeScript-centric which impacted velocity/complexity negatively. The few senior engineers (not talking about title here) that existed were grossly underused and underappreciated. Finally, the engineering org. was moving in the direction of an oligarchy where a select few (mostly, male) were invited to an invite-only room where technical strategy was discussed and decided upon. That decision process was not very inclusive, nor diverse. Oh, and on the topic of inclusivity and diversity - the DEIB group that used to exist was merged into a "work environment group" with a rather different assignment which was a bit sad.
