Toast

Perks of a startup:

• Free food and beer.
• Poker nights.
• Company outings.
• Etc.

Nice open offices with good lighting. Plenty of quiet rooms as well.

Upper management actively seeks feedback about the company and tries to communicate on a regular basis.

The engineering team is always under the gun with tight deadlines. The reason for this is that the codebase for the product has grown piecemeal, and progress towards refactoring into manageable components has stalled over and over.

Code releases are a headache as every team ends up pushing new features into the same codebase at the same time to make the cutoff for check-ins, only for conflicts to arise as commits conflict.

There's a strange lack of autonomy when it comes to developing features; every project has to be signed off by an architect or team lead, who happen to be the original developers of the product.

Management may solicit feedback but won't act on suggestions for the engineering team. Upper management seems at a loss how to deal with the lack of productivity within the group.

If you're not committed to working nights and weekends, expect your review to reflect that you may not be a "culture" fit.

We've hired and lost a number of talented staff because Toast doesn't offer much of a career path outside of meeting tight deadlines to keep a badly written product usable while the rewrite of it is being finished.

Maybe you'll want to look at why engineering is continuously underperforming before throwing more bodies at the problem.