Pros
- The product can change and legitimately has changed customers' lives for the better. - The individual contributors I've worked with have been almost uniformly incredible people and co-workers. - The benefits are top-notch (vision, dental, health, and life insurance; transit subsidies; solid PTO allowances; volunteer days, etc.).
Cons
- Layoffs are becoming more frequent and disruptive. - Internal communication is horrendous, with teams regularly reverting work that other teams just proudly finished, a concerning lack of alignment even with respect to incredibly fundamental tenets of the company's philosophy and mission, interdepartmental policies being hashed out and introduced via backchannels without ever being documented publicly, and the list goes on. - Management, with few exceptions, is markedly incompetent. It regularly takes anywhere between three months and a year and a half (and counting) for promises made by managers I've had at Simple to actually be carried out to completion. There have been multiple periods of upwards of 8 weeks during which I haven't had a single interaction with my supposed manager. - Attempting to plan for and cultivate a career at Simple is nigh-impossible. The manager I've reported to has, at times, changed on a monthly basis. Pay fluctuates wildly, with some "promotions" actually resulting in lower pay than your previous, less-skilled, and easier role. Re-orgs and layoffs every ~6 months don't help, either. - Compensation/performance reviews, despite being promised every six months at one point, are very nearly always delayed or outright canceled, with some employees not having had a single compensation or performance review in over two years. - The currently-great benefits have, at times, been promised and then retroactively voided, with at least one instance where rollover PTO was repeatedly promised as late in the year as the final week in December, only to have it announced in January that no rollover PTO would be honored. - Income equity across the company is nonexistent, with some employees regularly working half-time while making 2-5 times what those working full/overtime do. - White, aggressive men thrive and regularly rise to fill power vacuums left by layoffs here. If you're a woman or person of color, know what you're getting yourself into.