Culture is horrible and management is wearing blinders. Run for the hills.
Pros
In-demand product space with world-changing impact potential. Challenging and interesting engineering problems. Friendly, engaging, and capable individual contributors that are a joy to work with. Supportive and understanding HR staff and decent benefit offerings.
Cons
Incompetent managers without any people management skills or experience, and no accountability for management up to the highest levels. Blame rolls downhill and is placed on individual contributors. Managers are incapable of accepting critical feedback. Gaslighting and denial is the standard response (any concerns are presumed to be the product of misunderstanding), or they'll feign understanding and concern themselves before promptly ignoring the feedback in practice. This makes our "feedback and vulnerability" company value at best a depressing joke. Everything is an "emergency" when our customers always seem like they are about to give up on us, so we're constantly cutting corners to implement and ship things we promised them months or years ago at the last minute. Engineers are blamed for the inevitable issues that arise from this mentality, after the initial insult of being ignored or shunned when they provided planning suggestions and realistic estimates proactively. Management is a broken record saying "this is the last time" bad planning and practices will dominate, that "next time will be better/we'll do things the right way". As you would predict, work-life balance notably lacks respect even amongst start-ups when you're constantly paying for mismanagement. There is an undeniable and concerning monocultural bias in the company seemingly related to the founders and most engineering managers being recent immigrants from the same country and sharing the same ethnicity and gender. This bias leads to the management being either unwilling or unable to fully comprehend or implement ideals that American employees might value or expect, such as: respecting others regardless of their role in the hierarchy, meeting commitments that they've made to others, having awareness of and taking responsibility for personal failings instead of scapegoating others, giving others the benefit of the doubt when presented with something they initially find concerning or disagreeable, general appreciation for the value of good communication or the importance of employees feeling fulfilled and secure. These individuals do pay lip-service to any ideals that might come up in conversation, but without any follow-through in practice, making it difficult to hope for change. (To be clear, this is a specific problem with these individuals, it's just helpful to see how these problems fit in a cultural context. Of course there is nothing wrong with any ethnicity, and there are many employees with the same ethnicity as these individuals that don't or wouldn't contribute to these problems. The company is diverse, and that is a good thing; if anything, it could stand to be more diverse, especially in management.) Countless other issues. Severely crowded office, insufficient bathrooms for number of employees (probably not meeting code), unreliable residential-quality internet shared by everyone in the office. Unsustainable tech debt, people doing good work lacking positive recognition, failures being ignored or even somehow repackaged as successes and ego-boosters for management. General inability to have honest conversations in the company (anyone bringing anything of substance up is immediately shut down by management, told to take it "offline", and spoken to one-on-one). In summary, the situation seems hopeless. Management doesn't seem to have the capability to understand how deep our problems go, let alone how to begin to fix them. You probably don't want to work here, and current employees are already jumping ship. (Lastly, you may notice contradictory positive reviews always show up to rebut negative ones. This is because management actively pressures employees, many of whom have their immigrant visas dependent on their continued employment, to post positive reviews to bump the average up. [Only continuing the trend of tone-deaf management responses to problems.] Beware.)
