Vantaggi
None anymore. The company has lost all sense of direction and culture from where it was a couple of years ago.
Svantaggi
New management took over PatientsLikeMe earlier this year as a result of an acquisition (after 2 other acquisitions in the prior couple of years). There is not a clear direction for projects, there is not a clear sense of team structure, and the attrition rate is extremely high. Despite the company being around for over a decade, the average tenure of an engineer is approximately 2 months. Most other departments have similar attrition/retention rates. For example, 2/3 of product management is less than 2 months old. Everybody who has been at the company for any length of time is actively looking for new jobs, and no efforts are being made at all to adjust culture, retain old employees, or maintain and transfer institutional knowledge. After I gave notice and offered assistance in transitioning, I had exactly 0 communications with anyone in management short of a brief exit interview. The COO, who is the son of the primary investor, has neither management experience nor engineering experience, and his effectiveness is questionable. We briefly had a glimmer of hope in October when the interim CEO was replaced with a new CEO who saw the problems and had concrete plans to address them. This new CEO was widely liked and seemed to be doing all the right things to turn the culture/business around. Unfortunately he did not last due to internal politics. He was fired after just a week and a half and the original interim CEO was put back in place. Several people have left the company since that has happened. Sales staff are encouraged to inflate or misrepresent facts and statistics about the company in order to sign deals, and essentially all metrics have been on a constant and steady decline since new management took over. The level of mismanagement and lack of oversight on projects is egregious.