Backtrace Reviews

The two founders are deeply unethical and incompetent. They publicly insult employees, dismiss and become defensive over disagreement, waste time micromanaging trivial problems, and devote significant engineering resources to technical projects without any proven business purpose. If you disagree with them technically, they'll often become flustered and attack you personally, having no other ground to stand on. They use ridiculously silly terms like "alpha" to describe themselves. They've been caught outright lying many times. They gossip about employees to other employees. You may not personally be targeted, but you'll see your fellow co-workers take the brunt. This has been brought up with management several times. There was agreement this was a problem, but they seem unable to fix anything. There's a surprising lack of rigor and logic when it comes to running the business and engineering roadmap. Decisions are made based on emotions and vague references to past experiences. There's an overall aversion to communication from the founders towards the rest of the team. The employees have learned to solve problems without them, which, while it speaks to the capabilities of the team, does not make for a good environment. The founders are engineers by training, but they seem to have regressed, unfortunately. They hold their employees to certain standards but feel free to commit bad code themselves. They waste immense amounts of time demanding conformance to a style guide they don't themselves follow. There's been a mass exodus over the past year. This would be worse than Uber if it were a larger company. Avoid.

This startup is young and yet has has seen more than a reasonable amount of developer attrition, because management has no idea what they're doing. If you look on their about page, most of the engineers are remote, because that at least protects them a little bit from having to interact with management. You can even see it here on GlassDoor. As of this writing, 2 of the reviews are obviously fake, and management thinks they're actually going to fool people. This is a little preview of how they'll treat you if you work here. The product is not focused. The process that goes into deciding how the product should evolve is done without education, experience, or discipline. The culture is toxic. Employees hide from management by working out of the office as much as possible, and management hides from employees in the same way. Work/Life balance is a joke. It's always "heads down" time. Management has on many occasions pressured people into working evenings and weekends, saying this is how you get ahead in your career.