Pros: I love working for Lucid. The company is still new enough that their people come first. The founder is still an engineer there! Pay and benefits are good. Remote-first is great. 10/10 would recommend.

Cons: I honestly have none at this point. Well, maybe the onboarding mentor could have been better. But the rest of the team picked up his slack. Everyone is willing to help out. It's a characteristic they look for in new hires.

Pros: * (Engineering) Very capable, smart people, but a culture of teamwork and inclusion. I feel trusted and capable, but also surrounded by mentors. * Catered meals Monday and Friday * Stocked company kitchen * Beautiful office * VR room (to blow off steam) * Annual company retreat * Great benefits * Annual company 3-day hackathon * Awesome management (open, communicative, available) * Excellent opportunity for advancement and development * Fun technology * All levels of management care deeply about the employees * Well-run company

Cons: * Pay rate leaves much to be desired - of my several offers out of college, Lucid's was the lowest by a fairly wide margin. * While an expectation to work extra hours does not exist, there is a developing cultural pressure to do so. * Open office can be noisy - nothing a cheap set of earplugs or earbuds won't fix, but can be distracting.

Pros: I love the work. The product is interesting and there's really above average opportunity to work on code that does legitimately interesting things. This is probably one of those rare places where my education in algorithms has actually been relevant now and again. The people are great. The engineering department has always had a great culture that's felt very "work hard, play hard", with people who are super competent as well as super helpful, and a minimum of micromanagement. I've always felt like work life balance was up to me without a lot of pressure from my managers. In terms of AI adoption I feel like we've been handling it a little better than I expected. I still see slop getting pushed by junior engineers, but the temperature seems to be sufficiently AI skeptical among the seniors to keep that in check, and we've certainly had great support with our AI tools. In the past I've been pretty concerned about the kind of political groupthink that's pretty routine in the industry and rears its head at times here, but I have also seen enough positive pressure in the opposite direction to feel encouraged that you're not in serious danger of facing consequences for having a controversial opinion. (This would be mostly a con if it weren't for the industry standard.) For whatever their weaknesses may be, I'm genuinely convinced that the people in charge of this company are honest, approachable, and well-intentioned. I don't ever feel like the executive team is lining their pockets to buy golden underpants.

Cons: Does Lucid pay poorly or is this economy just that bad? Either way, for my seniority and relative frugality it's pretty unbelievable just how hard it is to scrape by on my current salary. I probably would have looked for a new job a while ago if I hadn't accumulated as many RSUs as I have, but honestly I'm losing hope that those are ever going to be worth anything. Since COVID and especially Ukraine I've watched this company go from routinely overshooting goals to routinely undershooting them and regularly pivoting our strategy and reversing previous decisions. I want to believe that it's going to pay off, but the odds feel longer all the time. Despite some relatively positive signal about industry groupthink it still feels like the powers that be pat themselves on the back for being so "civil" if and only if no one actually voiced a real contrary opinion. Do that and someone from HR will inevitably show up to invite people to turn down the temperature (read: agree with the mainstream opinion). "Diversity" in this area feels like a bag of M&Ms: we're all different colors on the outside (wow! So diverse!), but on the inside it's all the exact same flavor. This is tricky. I think the industry sucks at this and at best we're slightly better than average.