Pros: - Friendly, talented, nice people at the level I worked at (hands-on work with the product and customers). The people who actually interact with the product are the best I've ever worked with, which made it even harder to part ways so suddenly when layoffs happened. - Focused on diversity and they appear to have actually tried to incorporate diverse voices at all levels of the company, not just the entry level. - In the first couple of years, lots of nice team events: lunches, dinners, Scribble.io, swag. They even sent us plants with a full kit to start planting them. - Solid benefits: good pay, stock options, healthcare, and a lump sum monthly stipend that you can apply to anything on your credit card spending. Extra holidays, including a summer break and winter break that other companies don't have, and unlimited PTO (take that as you will). - No pressure to work onsite or commute. Fully remote-friendly, and I liked that. I don't think being remote is to blame for culture issues; it's management.

Cons: It hurts me to have to write this section, but it needs to be said. This was the best company I've worked for in my short time since graduating, and it's just sad to see the way things have gone for Karat. Poor management. Layoffs. Broken culture after starting out so good. Lack of transparency. I'll go on in more detail below. - Poor management of budget led to the events that spiraled downhill in 2023. We already had very few team events by the end of 2022 because of poor morale and revenue dropping off a cliff. Two massive layoffs less than five months apart really killed the vibe. - After the first layoff (January), team events basically stopped altogether. We lost lots of talented teammates and didn't even get to say goodbye. After the layoff, work simply continued but with a tense atmosphere where everyone wanted to prove that they belonged, wanted to build projects, but had nothing to build. - Had to find work on my own to look busy because so little work was being assigned to my team. Straight up, no clue what management was thinking. You have nine talented engineers who are being paid full-time salaries; make use of their time, please? - Generally baffling decision-making by higher-ups. Why acquire Triplebyte, a name mired in controversy and negative press, when Karat is already starved of funding and had one round of layoffs already? Doesn't make sense in the least. - Then not one but two security breaches on our marketing site due to having used a third-party vendor when the company was new. The first time, I get it. But the second time? How did you let that happen? The domain got blacklisted on Google's malware detection list, and we had to work late to reach out to Google Support and get that unlisted so people could start using the marketing site again. - Absolute breakdown of transparency and trust between the IVE community and full-timers. IVEs generate the value and interact with Karat customers directly; they deserve better. The loss of trust led to rumors spreading rampant, and the response from management was to create a brand-new channel outside of Slack and kick them all out. Now we couldn't communicate with them at all, and it had to all go through a third-party team called CX. Or, they had to just cut a ticket and wait for one of us to see it. Extending the game of telephone is not the best look for improving transparency. - Too many Karens and basic bros in middle management and higher management. They aren't technical. They don't know the product, and all they do is manage people and sit in meetings all day. You can tell in how they approach talking about our product in the first place. Just utter disconnect from the technical work of the people they manage, while they produce no value aside from wasting time in meetings with stories of what latte they had over the weekend or where they went fishing with their dog. If you want to save revenue, start with them and cut down on meeting length too. - Fresh, shiny ideas of a UI/UX collective, a diversity panel, or a product design bootcamp are proposed but never materialize. There is just no commitment to following through on good ideas, and they end up wasted. A Slack channel is created, we're added, and then it just sits there with no activity and no follow-up.

Pros: The short time I was there, I was paid extremely high for a great job.

Cons: - The company is private and confidential. - A small amount of actual Karat employees makes it difficult to manage all the freelancers. - You never know where you stand; they change their position on a weekly basis with no warning. - They pretend to be this fully positive company, but in the background are very cutthroat and lethal. - Poor communication. - They suddenly decided to lower the UK contracting rates to almost a 70% decrease, so we left in bulk. - They are replacing Americans, Canadians, and Europeans with cheap labor from Asia and South America. - Unnecessarily complicate simple workflows.

Pros: Wonderful manager and teammates. Friendly vibe. People want to help, learn, and improve. There is lots of passion for the product, for inclusion, and for their team. Benefits weren't bad. You got a monthly stipend to spend on anything. You just linked it to your card, and it automatically reimbursed you for $150. They had medical and gym discounts. There was a good work-life balance too. People rarely worked overtime, except for when we were on-call.

Cons: Team events were fun and hype for the first year I was there. The second year we got budget constraints and all that went out the window, along with all the talk of inclusion. I had to write code to identify what countries interview engineers were working out of, in order to remove the ones in higher-income countries from the interview matching algorithm so that it could prioritize the IVEs in India. I suppose the existing IVEs who had been working in our platform for years would simply cease to get additional interviews. Also it was a startup and there were many growing pains from the days it was founded, like hardcoded strings and numbers in crucial files that were written back in 2016, but you just have to know because you cannot go back and refactor it all. The janky way we had to just talk to the right person to get this information was worrying. Documentation was also not fantastic, with lots of tribal knowledge on teams and on-call required tons of repetition to convey information that should've been written down in the docs. The HR industry is just full of Karens, and some of our team events were cringe af. We'd go into breakout rooms to discuss our favorite book and straight up everyone in my room said Harry Potter. It doesn't get more basic lol. I think that was a sign of hard times to come because after we implemented that, we were kept on hold without a project for nearly a month before my whole team were let go in layoffs. I don't want to do tech anymore because of this.