Pros: Strong business strategy in the AV industry. Great environment as an engineer for gaining experience in customer interactions. Comp was competitive, skewed toward equity.

Cons: It's a shame that the cons outweighed even those very solid pros. Developer Stress Feature requests from customers can come at any time and get pushed directly onto software developers with almost no notice. Management expects developers to fulfill these sudden and absolute deadlines along with anything else scoped for each 5-week cycle, even if that means (to paraphrase one manager) taking time out of sleep to finish. All engineers additionally have to sit in long customer meetings when bugs or questions arise. Toxic Culture To fit in as an engineer, you'd better be a white/Asian frat bro in your 20s with no family or other home commitments. Borderline hazing toward new employees when arbitrary procedures are not followed to the tee. Respect is earned and ideas adopted by being the loudest, most argumentative, "scariest" person in the room. Any feedback brought up to higher-ups was not only discounted, but also treated as hostile, discouraging any negative comments. C-Suite made baseless personal accusations about a competitor's leadership in an effort to sway my signing decision; super unprofessional. Messy Codebase Amazing how a simulation company has software that runs so slowly, with brute-force, memory-intensive procedures now ossified into its architecture. They're just recently starting to care about this because they pass on the costs of execution to their customers. Junior developers get hit the hardest trying to clean up all the code debt that the senior developers introduced in previous years' rush to get a product out.

Pros: 1. Other software engineers are fun and talented people to hang around with. 2. Learn a lot. 3. Company financials seem healthy and even impressive (for now; I question the scalability). 4. Prestige is quite high. Most of the employees interned/worked at FAANG-adjacent before, and many move on to FAANG-adjacent once they are fed up with the place. Pro or Con? 1. Young average age (may be a pro or con, depending on who you are). A lot of new grads/former new grads (joined applied when they graduated, never left).

Cons: 1. No WLB. When I say no, I mean 11-12 hour work days on average personally. If you ever swing by the office at 5:30 PM, you will not be able to find parking anywhere (mandatory 5 days in the office for almost everyone). It's gotten so bad that Applied started having people park in other offices nearby. Needless to say, those aforementioned companies are not happy with their parking spots being taken by Applied without a formal agreement with the landlord. 2. Quite insane release cycles with overpromises. I feel the company culture is "overpromise and hope you find some way to deliver," and when you don't deliver, consequences happen. This leads to a lot of burnout, people working until past midnight onward. 3. While people are nice, people are busy. Makes it hard to get support when needed in my experience. I feel I am technically on my own a lot, which combined with the intense pressure of needing to deliver somehow, is quite stressful. 4. Turnover is extremely high. I've counted 5% of the company leaving within their first year. This is only among the people that I found. There is probably more than double that amount who have left within a year. I can't tell who left by choice or who got fired. But regardless, it's not great. Applied told me the turnover is quite low (20% in 2 years maybe? Which is honestly standard even for big tech companies). I find this number hard to believe though. 5. Permanent (?) oncall for some. I see coworkers working very closely with a customer, and if the customer is having issues, the main employee assigned to that customer often is just stuck there fixing the crap. Oftentimes, the crap they are fixing isn't even the same thing they worked on, making it extremely difficult to fix as well as focus on their own work. 6. Software stability is a joke at best. This is probably due to the value of "speed above all things." Good software is software that makes money, but reliability is one of the best features to ship.

Pros: - Fast pace - Great benefits - Exciting/important work - Great mission - Smart coworkers - Company is doing well Would recommend to anyone.

Cons: - Base salary could be better. - WLB may be a concern to some.