Karat

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.

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.