Luminance AI

• Great for self-motivated learners
• Excellent place to take responsibility, have autonomy, and apply what you're learning to real systems that hundreds of clients use
• Well compensated - if you ask for it!
• You can very quickly get good at what you do

• A slim force of seniors stick with the company, and there's an abundance of graduates; it's hard to know if you're doing things right when nobody is there to say otherwise and offer mentoring.
• Very high churn; after a while, people realise the compensation/learning/culture/stress/work-life balance could be better suited for them elsewhere. Usually happens in waves.
• Strange budgeting; only got Macbooks for everyone when forced to by COVID-19. Before this we were on Ubuntu boxes with 2012 CPUs, and about two SSDs between 30 engineers. It makes one question how much management valued employee's time!
• No real financial support for working from home, or if you need extra equipment for e.g. RSI.
• Whimsical deadlines keep popping up, and people repeatedly get burnt out working overtime to get things shipped. They say responding to business demand is "agile", but it could be managed/estimated better.
• No Agile practices; lots of micro-managing when features need to get developed.
• Focus seems to be around securing new clients and signing big contracts, and doing whatever it takes (lots of work on very short notice!).
• Due to constant pressure to firefight and release new features to get sales, the long-term vision is unclear and people get siloed into their roles. Eventually your learning rapidly slows down, and you realise you can be an expert in this role but your career will suffer.
• Job descriptions are a bit off the mark; "devops" engineers are more ops+support, and nobody uses C/C++ here.

But overall: if your values are in line with the company's, you can have a great time here (for quite a while)!

1. Build a culture of learning and knowledge-sharing.
2. Don't take on so much work that people are stressed and working inefficiently - find balance and push back against sales teams!
3. Dedicate some time to exploring skills and knowledge that's not directly related to making sales. Put some focus on becoming more efficient and automating away repetitive processes.
4. Organise 1-to-1s regularly and stick to them, giving real feedback, and be open to criticism too.