Applied Intuition

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).

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

It's important to make sure people actually enjoy working at your company. Applied is able to hire strong talent quite successfully due to the external market not being great, but when the market returns, what will happen to the pissed employees that only came here because they had no other options?