Pros
- Some really nice benefits like free lunch, free snacks, cab service in the morning and evening, Friday work-from-home, a good medical insurance. - The people. I personally met some really amazing people here and the office feels like a close knit group at times. - The product outfit for the most prominent classifieds sites in Sri Lanka (ikman), Bangladesh (Bikroy) and Ghana (Tonaton). - Extremely approachable senior management. - Some parts of the tech stack have been built with current day tech, like React, GoLang, Docker and Kubernetes. - Given the size of the team (30 last time I checked), a lot of responsibility falls on you to ideate and get your feature out. - In terms of workstations and such, not too many questions asked. Whatever you need to be productive will be given to you if you ask for it. :) - A well structured organisation, which is both a boon and a bane. But I've personally seen it do good things for the most part. Things are documented, RCAs are sent out periodically when there is an outage, JIRA boards are maintained, etc. - A quaint office. - A pretty good work-life balance.
Cons
- In the effort to make Saltside profitable by 2019, a lot of features have been and are being dished out with ample tech debt that never gets paid off. Everyone is pushing forward, but there's only so much a ship can sail forward before the holes in the hull will pull it down. - A very high attrition rate. As mentioned in the list of pros, the people here are amazing ... but it really is a bummer when the same people leave. The attrition rate is alarming right now, and to be honest, it feels like a snowball effect at this point, with people leaving, causing more people to leaving, which is causing even more people to leave. - A lack of trust. The place used to boast of a get-your-shit-done attitude. As long as your work was delivered, no one would bother with how many WFHs you've taken or when you've come into work / when you've left work. However now everything feels like it is actually being taken into account, such as WFHs which are now limited, and having to come into office on time. - The office location. - As mentioned in the pros, some parts of the tech stack are built with current day tech. However, there's still a huge chunk of the architecture that is built with ageing tech so there really isn't much to show for yourself in terms of learning. - A general sense of confusion. This might just be a personal thing, but towards the last few months of my time at Saltside, I was just plain confused. I was seeing projects being scrapped mid-development, I was clueless about the impact of the features my team was building, projects that other teams were building (which I felt would change the course of the company) were not being given the priority that they should have been given.