Pros
1. Pay and benefits are good. ( You are very likely to be overpaid.) This it makes a good place for those who prioritize current salary over long term career growth. Especially for those in their 30s, with no aspirations of moving into exec roles, this tends to work out well. 2. For fresh engineering grads, the end to end exposure to the stack is a decent opportunity. This makes most sense for those who are at under 18 months of experience or have not worked in a modern technology oriented company yet. After a point the returns of this are diminishing though. Once you've learnt the nitty-gritty, it makes sense to move on. 3. For several non-engineering roles, there is limited work to do in addition to the high pay mentioned in point 1. Finance executives / content specialist / customer support / operations / analyst folks are all paid significantly above market rate. So if you're looking for relaxed work and easy pay, it may make sense in these roles. Note that the downside is that there is no growth path for these roles, so choose wisely based on where you are on the balance between career growth orientation and immediate financial needs / need for time outside work.
Cons
1. Extreme survivorship bias amongst org leaders and leads. Most strong contributors have left, and the 'remainers' have seen disproportionate career growth (at least on paper) - without proper screening for their technical and managerial capabilities. This is largely due to a failure to onboard mid to senior folks from outside the company, leaving the management with little choice. Make sure you vet your eventual manager well. Do not join if you feel they cannot be capable mentors to you. 2. Growth for those at 3+ years of experience is not planned. Most such growth tends to be incidental (your manager leaving). It doesn't help that most managers, in terms of capability, are not too different from a 4-7 year experience band employee (even though some may have more experience on paper), and struggle to groom people who have gone past the first few years experience. Disclaimer : For candidates that are not from institutions / companies that are considered to be in the top tier ( sorry for the snobbishness but I think this is a useful input), this may still be a good opportunity for some hands-on technical experience and a pay raise, at least for a 2-3 year time frame. Typically, people who are making a transition from this sort of a situation tend to be reasonably happy in the first 2-3 years. For people with an entrepreneurial bent of mind / already in a top tech company / from an academic background that gets you interviews in the right places, this may not be the best place for your next gig. The only exception to this could be data science, where there has been a recent senior hire. If you're willing to bet on this person staying long-term, it may be worth some consideration. 3. Work-life balance for engineers can often go for a complete toss. Happens in other startups too, except the upside of hours spent toiling is not the same here as it would be in a high growth startup. 4. For those who look at things beyond immediate career growth, compensation and work-life balance, the company has some strategic challenges. In 7 years of existence, the company has failed to get a strong product market fit. The messaging market is pretty much lost, and so discovering social media niches is the focus of the current strategy. This leads to a lot of hit-and-trial sort of work that is more typical of earlier stage companies, in the hope that something will work. The challenge for Hike is that it has to deal with a lot more legacy code and tech debt than an early stage company. This leads to a significantly slower speed of iteration. Though well capitalized, funding is not infinite,and so there are only so many iterations that the company can go through at this point. The clock is ticking.