All that glitters isn't gold... - Anonymous employee Karat Employee Review

1.0
Mar 26, 2022
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Pay and benefits were good. There are some people within the company who have actual values and want to do good work, so depending on the team you might enjoy working with them.

Cons

What was once great company is definitely starting to lose it's way. As another reviewer mentioned there have been many departures of great staff. Under the surface they were either pushed out or left due to the growing lack of integrity with leadership. They claim to care about interviewing and providing opportunity, however the real driving factor is solely for money and trying so hard to be the next big name like Amazon, and they will step on anyone who doesn't agree with their path of getting to that level. Just because a company is getting larger does not mean it is getting better, and in Karat's case it is getting worse. The quality of the product offered has gone down exponentially. They will roll out all the stops in the beginning, but keep an eye out, especially if you are not a "yes man" and have ideas that don't fall into the "Karat way" of always doing things.

Explore other reviews about Karat

5.0
Jun 11, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

collaboration leadership mission driven work-life balance

Cons

lack of open-minded team members

3.0
Apr 27, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Wonderful manager and teammates Friendly vibe. people want to help and learn and improve. Lots of passion for the product, for inclusion, for their team. Benefits weren't bad. You got a monthly stipend to spend on anything, just link it to your card and it automatically reimbursed you for $150. They had one medical and gym discounts. Good work life balance too, people rarely worked overtime except for when we were oncall.

Cons

Team events were fun and hype for the first year I was there. The second year we got budget constraints and all that went out the window, along with all the talk of inclusion. I had to write code to identify what countries interview engineers were working out of, in order to remove the ones in higher-income countries from the interview matching algorithm so that it could prioritize the IVEs in india. I suppose the existing IVEs who had been working in our platform for years would simply cease to get additional interviews. Also it was a startup and there were many growing pains from the days it was founded, like hardcoded strings and numbers in crucial files that were written back in 2016 but you just have to know because you cannot go back and refactor it all. The janky way we had to just talk to the right person to get this information was worrying. Documentation was also not fantastic, lots of tribal knowledge on teams and oncall required tons of repetition to convey information that should've been written down in the docs The HR industry is just full of karens and some of our team events were cringe af. We'd go into breakout rooms to discuss our favorite book and straight up everyone in my room said harry potter. It doesn't get more basic lol I think that was a sign of hard times to come because after we implemented that, we were kept on hold without a project for nearly a month before my whole team were let go in layoffs. I don't want to do tech anymore because of this

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