Zoox

Good food, good work-life balance. The software built by the previous generation of leaders is pretty good, so you can learn quite a bit. There's a good opportunity to take ownership since a massive amount of employees are leaving after the Amazon acquisition.

1. Leadership is extremely weak and dishonest. Zoox had arguably better tech than most AV companies but ended up with a fire sale. The executives made millions of dollars while early employees lost money. The CEO came in when the company was valued at $3.2B with only one goal: to raise money. They sold the company for $1.3B and somehow got a bonus of tens of millions of dollars. Don't just take my word for it; the company is being sued right now for the acquisition. So, do yourself a favor and Google it. A lot of information will come out in the following months. If you go on Blind, you can also find many threads from Zoox employees about this.

2. Zoox fired its founder and CEO a year ago and lost its soul. The CEO was a bit crazy but had ideas, vision, and commitment. After firing him, Zoox decided to hire the chief strategy officer of Intel (and yes, you can't make this up). If there is one Silicon Valley company that failed miserably for the past two decades due to bad strategy, that's Intel. I'm not saying it's all her fault, but she has to be accountable. Do you really want to work for a company that fired its founder and hired a career executive with a horrible track record?

3. The success of Zoox is largely due to very good hiring in the early days. A bunch of really good engineers built a very impressive software stack. Unfortunately, most of them have left already. If you search past employees of Zoox on LinkedIn, you will know what I'm talking about. A lot of them went to Waymo and Cruise. If you are impressed with Zoox's technology, I suggest you find these people at Waymo and go work for them. On the other hand, you can also find on LinkedIn that very few engineers from competitors like Waymo and Cruise joined Zoox. That's not a good sign.

4. There are tons of politics at work. People in general really care about climbing the ladders. Most people spend most of their days in meetings, even junior-level ICs. There are a lot of PMs, a lot of planning meetings, and a lot of software engineers spend more time on Google Docs than writing software. The company is run like Google, but with zero revenue. You can imagine how that will go.

Be honest. Ask yourself, how can you sleep at night?