Pros
1. The people. For a company based in Indonesia, this was the best pool of people I've encountered. Compared to other Indonesian companies: - Diverse and international pool of people - Almost no politics among peers - People are time-efficient and smart - People are not nosy about your personal life - People lead interesting lives outside of work. Some of these colleagues become good friends outside of work. 2. Both a pro and a con: you are expected to wear many hats no matter your role. The C-levels hate clear delineation of roles & responsibilities (I've asked a C-level in a 1:1 regarding roles among the C-levels. That C-level told me that the C-levels just take whichever project they like/have capacity on. The CEO doesn't like roles). The pro is: you get to learn a lot of things. 3. You get ESOP. Quite rare for a Southeast Asian company. But with their recent austere efficiency measures, I’m not sure if ESOP is part of any packages anymore.
Cons
1. The cofounders want everything done at once: at any given time there are like 20+ projects running at the same time, and they want all of them run at maximum efficiency, highest quality, lowest cost, and lowest time -- which they don't realize are sometimes unattainable. They seem to believe in the credos of Silicon Valley tech/VC circles about exponential growth, 10x, limitless growth, etc. But never on real physical constraints or real human psychological constraints. 2. Very fast working environment that is difficult to stay afloat in: this is the fastest environment I've been in my life. Even more difficult to stay afloat on compared to attending a US engineering school. If you can't move fast and repeatedly hit the ground running, you'll get exhausted/burnt-out quickly. The learning curve always goes up, but not in a good way anymore. You really don't have a chance to stay afloat. Whenever you are afloat, more tasks/expectations will be ballasted your way. 3. Breaking changes too many times: C-levels don't shy away from introducing breaking changes (whether it be process, operating principles, compensations, etc.). e.g. The management announced a major planning paradigm change within 17 days of each other (from bottom up, to more top-down list of company priorities), expecting reprioritization ON THE NEXT DAY. Creating decision paralysis and task paralysis for many teams. 4. Management processes scale up but not balanced by expectations on output: we take more chunk of our time than before to write peer reviews, create plans, get graphs and deepdive the numbers for monthly reporting, but C-levels always expect a day-1-startup's level of output. 5. Permeating hack-it-til-you-make-it culture instilled by the cofounders: as the systems grow complex, many mid to low level workers realize the need for more careful planning to ensure the robustness of our systems. But CEO/CTO/COO often jumps down to certain teams with quick and major projects, expecting solutions to be shipped within days to a maximum of 2-weeks, often encouraging us to do the hacky solution to deliver the expected result. Thus cancelling the people's effort to create a robust system. 6. Shared resource to a fault: the ratio of QA:Eng or Data:All or Design:PM is quite unhealthy (data is worst, like 3-4 analysts vs the whole company) and the upper management turns a blind eye to the real struggles people face due to these "centralized" resources on the ground. They persuade us to think of the difficulties as upskilling opportunities, while practically those difficulties have already been eating at overall efficiency. 7. Example of getting to wear too many hats; boundless expectations for PMs. We are expected to do literally everything (customer interviews, scrum, UX design, data analysis/scripting, managing partner comms, manual testing, solutioning, product marketing, etc.) like a Silicon Valley-calibre PM no matter our level of experience, but with Southeast Asian pay. It got to a point where everyday you simply have more things to do than the capacity of work that you can humanly possess. Task paralysis and prioritization (re: ignoring lower priority items for long periods of time) become daily life. 8. C-levels don't acknowledge speed-accuracy tradeoff. A CPO officer said "it is not the right mindset to have" that quality and speed can't go hand in hand. Yes they can, but the C-levels are blind to the position on which they are currently standing on, Is it a position where quality and speed can be achieved simultaneously or there is still a long walk to get to a point where quality and speed can be achieved simultaneously? 9. Too action-biased: there is a serious lack of protection for sitdown/thinking/maker time and all the attention/opportunity/encouragement for action -- no matter whether the action is right for the long run or mindless. 10. Not valuing its people anymore: Xendit used to be a “family of honeybadgers” but now the cofounders are “honeybadgering” their own people (multiple stages of conspicuous and silent layoffs, rumors of forced resignations). The cofounders seem to be ruthless businesspeople only loyal to their investors.