Ambitious Company Held Back by Poor Management and Technical Debt
Pros
* Fast-paced and accountable work environment means that you will learn a lot in a short time period. * They have an interesting and complicated tech stack with many modern and cutting edge technologies. * They have some truly brilliant and competent engineers. It's a great place to white-board solutions to challenging problems. * Their place of business is the old MOCA building which makes for an unique/interesting environment. * They have the largest patient dataset. You might just be able to change healthcare and improve lives. * If you work hard and are competent there are plenty of opportunities for advancement. They strongly believe about promoting from within. * They've been sold to IBM so they'll likely slow-down and focus on a core set of competencies.
Cons
* An ill-defined notion of "accountability" coupled with poor planning requires fast execution which means sloppily written code and heroic, middle of the night efforts for success. This is not the type of place for those with families or who want work/life balance. * Their codebase is a nightmare designed by junior dev or sleep-deprived engineers. * The open-air environment and lack of sound dampening means that its impossible to not be distracted or to have meetings. * The environment encourages management to snipe ad-hoc requests at any random engineer within reach. * They're aggressive sales tactics mean tight deadlines. The lack of communication about deadlines means that the average engineer (even with proper management) will be constantly shifting focus and doing sub-par work. * They've been sold to IBM so they'll likely suffer the same consequences that befell Urbancode and other startups that were similarly acquired; bureaucracy and forced integration with IBM processes & tech even where it doesn't make sense.
