Vantaggi
The team is good, so many good people working there, friendly and collaborative. As a designer, you can be in a very fast-paced environment, in a complex product, and see your proposals get done in a short time. There's no fear of breaking things. Factorial is a place to be bold, launch things, see what happens. That's exciting! The opportunity is there for the company. There's a lot of competition but the proposal is interesting and there's truly a chance of doing something amazing People can speak their minds, and the founders try to listen. They're open to change their minds. You can talk to anybody and say what you think, and though in the last years there were so many management layers, now it's more horizontal. Kind of. Some teams are really nice and employees are happy working there. There have been many hard moments in the last year, and the company might need to revisit their objectives, but I think, after some months, things could stabilize and get way better.
Svantaggi
Management is very inept at managing. Many, many managers are new to managing, and they lack the experience (and in many cases, the humility) to know what to do, and the skills to be empathic and be more people-oriented than results-oriented. Even the ones that have good intentions in the end are crushed because of the pressure to achieve results and the chaotic environment. The company claims to be people-centric but that's absolutely not true. Results are the main thing. But the problem with that is that company objectives are not well defined. The company objective is mainly multiply income, and the goal is tremendously high year after year. I think it's normal to be ambitious, specially in a company like this. The issue comes when everything else that it's not growth doesn't fit in the quarterly goals. That's when cracks start to apear in the product (as this was a recognized problem when I left the company), and when people get burned out and frustrated because reaching goals seems impossible. Goals are set by leadership and many teams feel they're very random and not in touch with the reality of their features / code / clients. The role of designers have been changing with time, to having too many responsibilities, to having our view diluted too much and getting so much "design by committee" processes. They want to change it now but still to see how things will work out. Hyper growth, though it seems to have stopped in the last months, brought many challenges and some bad hires in c-level, which was painful. It brought many many changes all the time. Reorganizations that also felt random many times, and firings also among regular employees, so many it became "normal". Some times the firings were justified (but still, very painful because 1 year of a bad c-level can create huge problems), others felt like people were not given time to adapt and grow. Many employees are burned out because of the pressure, the crazy objectives and the changes. And the founders have not managed some issues in a way that hasn't helped people cope with the situation, on the contrary, it made people more anxious, even though changes were necessary. And I think founders need to have more people with different points of view to enrich them. If all people around the founders only agree to what they think, they live in a bubble.