Waste of time if not traumatic.
Gut am Arbeitgeber finde ich
Interesting problem space, young and energetic team, home office.
Schlecht am Arbeitgeber finde ich
In a company of around 15 people, a large share of the staff was let go at the same time, described as becoming "more lean", and without severance. The explanation given was that it did not legally qualify as a structural change.
Afterwards, from what I experienced, people who had already been let go were pushed toward termination agreements that were, in my understanding, clearly disadvantageous for them, including for their unemployment benefits. That is the part I found hardest to accept.
Verbesserungsvorschläge
Let engineering own engineering decisions, and communicate direction changes before people have built for months.
And don't push people you have already let go toward termination agreements that cost them their Arbeitslosengeld. I found that cruel.
Arbeitsatmosphäre
For most of my 1.5 years, product decisions felt chaotic to me. Major engineering decisions were regularly overridden by the "creative side" without a technical rationale being given.
That absence of direction makes you feel like you're developing into a void and hard to stay connected to the work. My team once spent half a year on a product, and it was dropped in a single day after an investor meeting. My impression was that even at the top there was no clear picture of what we were building toward.
In my career so far, I have not experienced engineering input being weighted this lightly.
Kommunikation
Very loosely coupled teams. Depending on who you sit with, you can go days without a real conversation. Priorities change abruptly: you could be asked to drop everything you were working on without prior notice.
Kollegenzusammenhalt
Peer competition at its worst: my impression was that people pulled others down out of fear of looking incompetent themselves. I also experienced very little genuine interest from the company in how people were doing, including during long absences.
Work-Life-Balance
When I mentioned it was past 5 pm, the answer I got from a C-level was "This is a startup!". When things went south, staying late without compensation was expected.
Vorgesetztenverhalten
I saw people being reprimanded in online meetings for where they were looking on their screen, while the same person handled other work during 1-on-1s with me.
There were long all-hands lectures about using Slack channels instead of DMs, which in my experience was not reflected in how the person communicated themselves.
Interessante Aufgaben
The ideas and work is interesting, until they want you to click buttons and collect images all day as an engineer. You are expected to see very subtle visual details and judge results because "creative people" have other tasks. It gets incredibly boring afterwards.
Gleichberechtigung
Broadly everyone was treated the same, though I had the impression that proximity to one person made a substantial difference.
Umgang mit älteren Kollegen
There was not many old colleagues but they were respected.