Headspace

Daily lunches are healthy and delicious.

Walking distance to the Metro station.

In a beautiful green area of Santa Monica with nearby parks and gardens, lovely for strolling or riding company-provided bikes.

To improve the health and happiness of the world.

Sadly, as with many grandiose corporate missions, Headspace's mission statement is simply a shiny veneer to convince employees that enduring soul-crushing work conditions for sub-par compensation is a small price to pay for bettering mankind.

I joined during their largest growth phase, during which a small core team was nearly tripled within a few months, destroying any existing cohesive startup culture. The original engineers were promoted to managers before this growth spurt (apparently as a reward for being there first), but they were entirely unqualified to manage people's careers, and some of them, more egregiously, were not very competent engineers either.

Over the following months, the engineering team quickly devolved into your typical tech nerd Lord of the Flies situation - falsely empowered and frustrated 20-something managers utterly out of their depth and lacking any teeth to get things done for their team.

A rigid caste system soon developed, with the "original" employees (note that this "startup" is over 10 years old, but only the two founders stuck around more than half that long) on the top and everyone else on the bottom.

There exists a prevailing madness among the C-level leadership that hiring execs from large successful companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Zynga will somehow directly translate into similar success in a smaller company. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the conditions that made those execs successful in their previous roles do not, and generally will not, exist at Headspace.

Reason and logic notwithstanding, these people were continually hired with much pomp and name-dropping and immediately went about bringing on board their cronies with amusingly inflated titles and not-so-amusingly inflated salaries (I read the H1-B posts like a dummy). I counted 19 Directors when I left, most of which had zero direct reports.

The caste system ossified further, and the "ICs" as we came to be called (Individual Contributors AKA serfs/peasants) were further ground into the dust. Suggestions and complaints from us little folk were not only unheeded but met with passive-aggressive disapproval from our emotionally teenage managers, that would later develop into grudges. Meritocracy flew out the floor-to-ceiling doors to the city garbage dump across the street (in case you wondered what that smell was).

The CEO, Rich Pierson, has an ad agency background and runs Headspace as such. Entire departments will be created, pumped with enormous amounts of resources and hype, and then laid off en masse within the space of a year. Never have I seen so many people on all levels - from C-level all the way down - constantly coming on board and departing without ceremony.

The ranks of the engineering team are full of inexperienced and first-time engineers fresh from code academies, and Headspace is more than happy to take a chance on these people and pay them wages well below what's comfortable for Santa Monica.

For someone with no experience, this could be a good opportunity to get your foot in the door of the tech industry. Unfortunately, the word seems to already be out among talented senior engineers, as none are to be found working there, so the biggest thing you will take away is an awful taste in your mouth for corporate bloat and mismanagement.

For any senior engineers considering working at Headspace, I can't believe you read this whole review, but - STAY FAR, FAR AWAY!!

You cannot improve the world's health and happiness while ignoring the unhappiness you are creating right next to you.