Pros
studied robotics throughout school. it was hard to really say what applied does on the outside before i joined. after joining I realized we do a lot of different things and have many different products. we do whatever it takes to land a deal, often sprinting to build out complex features in short windows of time. this is good because we land deals. its bad because we are stretched thin and there is priority inflation everywhere- what is actually important? we sprint on things to prove we can do something and then following up to make it robust is a lower priority. things are changing though, and leadership recognizes we must change as we scale.
this is a lot different from the big tech experience. even at our size now, everyone works on important work. there is more work to do than people to do it which means we can only do the important work. our advantage has been that we are light on our feet and can quickly adapt to prove we can deliver value to customers.
as thrashy as it sounds, it works. i don't know who else out there moves as fast as we do. we constantly impress customers and land deals.
outside of the business model, the people that work here are
- most importantly, authentic people (no corporate bs)
- hard working and motivated, not just at work (lots of work hard, play hard people)
- very smart
the reason i am still here is
- i genuinely like the people that work here and some of them have become my closest friends
- i am learning at an extremely fast pace
- i am surrounded by people that are smarter than me
- there is extremely high transparency in how the business operates, and from what I have seen, I am convinced Applied will continue to be successful
- the company adapts frequently to market, we are always on cutting edge
- the equity growth has been strong
Cons
the reasons i consider leaving are
- i work a lot (anywhere from 40-65 hours a week, typically more than 50) and this can eat into my personal life
- i am pulled in many directions and find it stressful to manage at times
- things break a lot- our software, our developer tooling, our dependencies- this is generally going to happen in software all the time but the rate here is probably higher. sometimes this is not so bad long term because you learn something new and become a stronger engineer because of it
- i personally want to pursue something more health/fitness related in my future career
