toxic culture and management - Software Engineer Applied Intuition Employee Review

1.0
Apr 25, 2025
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Growing business, Smart engineers and free food.

Cons

You will be evaluated every month—yes, every month! If you do not meet their expectations, you will be fired. This underscores the high performance standards and continuous assessment process in place, where there's a strong emphasis on consistently meeting objectives to retain your position. You will be asked to provide feedback frequently. However, if your feedback is particularly negative towards someone, especially your manager, you need to be cautious. When you start your job, you'll be assigned a "hero project." The purpose of this isn't just to get you started with your work but, more importantly, to test you. These projects often have vague definitions, but the expectation is clear: you need to prove yourself. The project duration spans several months, but you'll be required to provide weekly updates and outputs. If you fail to meet their expectations, you may be fired immediately. It's not uncommon for someone who was just welcomed to the team to silently disappear later on. But if you’ve worked at other well-known companies, you probably know you’re worth more than this.

Explore other reviews about Applied Intuition

5.0
Jun 19, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- high growth opportunity - good business directions - products

Cons

- work hours - intense work environment

3.0
Apr 6, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Excellent business development strategy. Constant new customers and projects for engineers. If you wanted to run your own startup one day, you could do a lot worse than learn from Applied's strategies. - Fast-pace, challenging work for engineers. Very little abstraction means you touch most parts of the projects you work on. Good learning experiences. - Talented group of engineers to work with (see con about lack of seniority). - No-nonsense culture (at least at the start, see cons).

Cons

- Company has never learned to plan in my years here. Constantly making the mistake of compensating for lack of planning with crunching engineers. Attrition numbers tell the story. - Chasing best available business opportunities has led to its current success. It also means lack of focus and concerningly immature products given their age. - Shockingly does not grow comp with elevation to leadership positions. Lowballs new hires, then expects the existing equity to be enough reason to take on drastically more responsibility and give up technical work. - Great no-bullshit culture (drop BS meetings; technical need leads the way, not politics; avoid partisan politics at work, etc.) is degrading from the top. - New-grad heavy teams. Dearth of senior people to learn from is concerning. Good reason for new grads to move on quickly, or risk building bad habits. - Constantly uses valuation success in funding rounds to justify stunting comp growth. After 1-2 years you understand a truth: the company might be succeeding, but what does that have to do with you? - At some point, you learn enough from the firefighting. But the firefighting does not stop.

9
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