Senior Software Engineer - Senior Software Engineer Together Labs Employee Review

2.0
Dec 22, 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

When I started, the perks were great, the co-workers were enthusiastic and passionate, and the company was growing. The culture was infectious and there were plenty of company social events such as food trucks, wine/beer tasting, team outings, company-wide hackathons, and the list goes on. Many, many opportunities to grow in your career. Also, the compensations and stock option offer wasn't too bad given the company's size.

Cons

Engineering: Waaay too academic. This is a company that essentially founded and pioneered "Continuous Deployment" that so many startups enjoy today. Given that, it feels that we have to hand-roll every single thing when there are plenty of outside libraries that are solely dedicated to solving some of these problems. Why do we have to write our own 3D engine? Why do we have to come up with our own Data warehouse? Continuing with academia, somebody convinced the company to introduce Haskell into our tech stack. It's not that Haskell is awful, it's that it made absolutely no sense from a business perspective. We've been using it for roughly 2 years and only about 6 or 7 engineers of about 60 know how to use if proficiently. Compounded by the fact that we haven't been able to hire many Haskell experts! Also, too many people care about the tech more than the product or customer experience. Many people refer to what Facebook or the next big company does to support their technical suggestions instead of just solving the problem the way most normal companies do. Management: This is absolutely abysmal. Absolutely no product focus. Whatever makes the quickest buck wins. Quarterly goals are finalized once the quarter is halfway through... Once goals are finalized, everybody in company works at break-neck speeds to try and deliver a quality product in time. No wonder company morale is low and so many people are quitting. Meanwhile, companies are choosing to go "mobile first" and our mobile teams are second class citizens who had to "prove themselves". Completely resistant to massive change so we end up with these "partial" solutions and end up supporting more features than we should.

Explore other reviews about Together Labs

5.0
Apr 11, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Talent is top notch at Together Labs, leadership is transparent and available to the team. Focus should be on innovation in the product.

Cons

Distractions on new product ideas deterred progress on a community/creator based platform where this is still tons of opportunity - just requires focus, resources, and innovation.

3.0
Aug 4, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Some really bright and passionate people working there. IMVU is a pretty neat product and fun to work with. As developers, we were allowed (and even encouraged) to interact with our users directly, so there was a very tight feedback loop for any new feature we introduce.

Cons

Upper management took some huge risks on products nobody was really asking for, and when they didn't pan out, they weren't exactly straightforward about the status of the company. They kept laying off people in waves, always telling us it'll be the last time, only to do another layoff a few months later. Some of the code you work with is quite outdated and difficult to work with using modern tooling. There was also this weird obsession with doing everything in-house; if you wanted to add some open-source library there was a whole process you had to go through that involved multiple levels of management. Didn't matter if it was MIT-licensed or even public domain.

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