Pros
- There was a lot of great informal mentorship from the engineers that I had interacted with, most of them were knowledgeable and were consistently growing their technical skills
- Being able to work on a wide variety of projects gave a lot of breadth to knowing how to implement various ML/CV/NLP solutions to them,
- A large majority of folks here cared about each other and took time to check-in
- Great work-life balance
Cons
- Career development resources are inequitably distributed. Management received full degree funding while requests for a ML conference, and $50 in technical books were rejected 2 years in a row despite 2% training allocation.
- Upper management doesn't have formal experience with Artificial Intelligence, making it difficult for them to provide support to their teams and to sell solutions.
- Promotions appear limited to original team members from 5+ years ago. With no formal discussion on what targets needed to be met for my own.
- SDLC processes aren't consistently followed, and after 2 years the internal ticketing process still hasn't been systematized
- Innovation Factory projects heavily constrain technology choices to specific low-code platforms. Stifling creative and attractive solutions
- The company had hired far too many people on the possibility of getting more work, leading to a lot of us sitting around for weeks at a time.
- Had around 6 managers in a 2 year period
- Multiple rounds of layoffs that were all kept quiet
