Applied Intuition

Applied has strong customer pull, and there's a lot of potential in the market. Leadership knows how to make money, unlike most AV companies. We work on interesting tech with an extremely talented and driven team. The company is also very transparent internally.

Easily the worst company culture I've ever seen.

Our primary value is "speed above all else," which has turned the codebase into a bug-ridden mess because everyone is always rushing. We have a strong team, but code quality is very poor due to the working conditions and constant demands. Teams within the company use our tools and will often skip releases because they're filled with bugs.

The work-life balance is horrendous, but they act like this is a positive thing because you get to "grow." Well, I've worked at other companies that provided just as much growth without the high stress and insane hours. Many people on my team work well over 50 hours per week, sometimes 80+ during crunch times (which have become increasingly more frequent). I dread every on-call shift. On top of all that, the pay isn't even good. It's well below market.

They also have a policy that you can't write your job title on your LinkedIn profile, which is clearly designed to trap you and prevent employee poaching. Take a look on LinkedIn; you'll see that everyone just has the title "Engineering."

The weirdest part is that people are forced to act like they're okay with the insane rules and terrible WLB because dissenting opinions aren't allowed. Everyone seems afraid and intimidated constantly. Management is toxic; they claim to care about fixing these problems, but there has been no company messaging about avoiding burnout. There's no plan to ever let people work less than 50 hours. If they cared about people, the number 1 company value would not be speed above ALL ELSE.

Applied claims to have low turnover, but it's an absolute lie. I've seen many, many people leave after less than a year. They claim these people are "self-selecting" out of the company because they can't keep up, but really it's because most people aren't willing to deal with this absurd culture for terrible pay and a pitiful 3 weeks of PTO. Take a look at the average employee age on LinkedIn; it's under 25. We are seriously lacking in experienced talent because senior folks have much better options.

At the end of the day, I would only recommend Applied to new grads who are desperate to get experience in the robotics field. That's the only advantage of working here; you will learn and get good experience, even if you're miserable. For anyone else, especially people with families or actual lives outside of work, stay very far away.