Pros: Colleagues, collaboration, technical problems, and the stack.

Cons: Process, reporting structure, career development

Pros: Sigma has a wonderful culture and atmosphere - people are friendly, coworkers enjoy socializing together, and there's excitement around Sigma's continued success. The engineering department has a great VP who has vision and experience scaling small teams. Due to the founders being technical, there's a strong engineering culture within the company, with technical feasibility a first-class citizen among leadership. For example, due to site reliability issues, all of engineering took a month to focus on stability and tech debt instead of feature development, something I've never experienced on another production app. Post-pandemic, the company has moved to a hybrid work culture, with teams in the office 2-3 days / week. The leadership is fantastic. I've seen people be fired, but their last day of "official" employment delayed just so their options vest. Instead of trying to screw people out of every dollar like many places might, Sigma has consistently done right by people. They also do a comp adjustment to ensure existing engineers aren't getting paid less than incoming engineers.

Cons: On the one hand, having two founders who are brilliantly technical means there are tremendous opportunities to learn and grow. Both Rob and Jason actively and regularly push and review code. However, they both much prefer doing to teaching/leading, so less experienced engineers often find themselves floundering. I'd also be remiss if I didn't mention that one of the founders has a rather contentious approach that not everyone enjoys. If you work in a similar part of the codebase as him, you'll have to prove to him you know what you're doing before he trusts you. In the absence of that trust, expect extensive PR reviews. Feedback loop is nonexistent - both IC and managers often have no idea how they're doing until it's too late. Iteration speed is often high, with it occasionally impacting work / life balance. Leadership is a bit of a stickler about coming into the office.

Pros: Free lunch. Kitchens are stocked with a lot of snacks.

Cons: The leadership is quite insecure, which causes a management style that is opaque, impulsive, and borderline fraudulent. Posturing to compensate replaces effectively organizing people around a mission. Part of the insecurity emanates from the fact that Sigma is a late-stage startup without much to show in revenue (minuscule compared to what it burns) and, therefore, still highly volatile. The other part is inherent in that the cofounders are hired by a founding VC firm (SHV) and lack a vision of their own (or control, for that matter). They are essentially hired engineering help, which turns out quite mediocre when looked closely at the code. This lack of vision and control, combined with technical shallowness, feeds the volatility. The CEO, a first-timer, has a supporting role in the company. He doesn't command much respect from the founding investors and has no real power, which results in, unsurprisingly, occasional anger outbursts and contributes to the ongoing cacophony. There is no hope for a successful exit with the current leadership that would benefit an average employee.