Vantaggi
You could have a really large impact for how small this company is. The product was solid and the industry is interesting. There was an opportunity to learn about a lot of fundamentals of web apps and how a startup operates. The actual work was the best part, the culture at this company, which came from the top down, was absolutely terrible.
Svantaggi
Here is a little story for you to understand just how horrific this place is as far as employment. I worked here for just over a year, and had a really bad time there, enough for me to write my first negative on Glassdoor. The company fought it and I got an email from Glassdoor about how I needed to promise that everything I stated was truthful before they would put it back up again. I decided to move on with my life, because I was a little worried about the company retaliating in some unpredictable way, and so I let Glassdoor take it down. Fast forward many months and I get a random message on LinkedIn from someone I don't know. The person said something like "Hello, I saw you worked at Prodigiq, and I just wanted to ask you if you left a review on Glassdoor, because I am sure you had the same bad experience I did, and if more people left reviews, it would have prevented me from working there". Wild right? I felt bad, so I am now taking responsibility for my previous inaction and listing out a few reasons why I would never recommend this place to anyone. Hopefully this saves me from getting another message like that, and saves you from wasting your time applying to this company! 1. They made taking time off extremely difficult. The PTO is accrued, and they make using it as difficult as they can because they know that you'll be more likely to quit, and if you quit, you won't get your accrued PTO. I had about a week of PTO accrued, and I had to fight them to let me take even a half day on a Friday. When I quit, I didn't get the remainder of what I had accrued. In hindsight, this was obviously their intention all along. 2. They would have you work on days that had long been posted as a federal company holiday. Their reasons didn't ever really make sense, as there was not anything urgent enough to warrant coming to work. It was mostly about control 3. The work hours are 8am-6pm. Period. If you are on salary, you are doing mandatory unpaid overtime. This makes the lack of PTO and the sudden inexplicable removal of holidays feel particularly punishing 4. It was very hard to get work done. There were quite a few standups every day, and it felt like we spent more time talking about working than actually working. Lunch is also coordinated at noon, so if you hit flow state, too bad, you are expected to take lunch at the same time as everyone else. The CEO and CTO are also married, and they would bring their dog into the office every day. This dog would have loud and incessant panic attacks if they had to step out for a few hours. Super distracting! None of these are that big of a deal, but when you combine everything with their other policies and long hours, the employee experience just felt inefficient and difficult 5. Because the CEO and CTO are married, there isn't really anyone on the side of the employee. There is no HR department, or anyone you can go to if an issue arises. For this reason, churn was unbelievably high. It wasn't uncommon for someone to last just days or weeks. The amount of resources this company spent trying to hire people just to push them out with their ineffective and authoritarian policies was simply ridiculous. 6. Having to check-in before making a doctor appointment. As in, before you schedule a doctor appointment, you have to tell the boss that you intend on making an appointment for a specific day, and then call your doctor. Hopefully your doctor has that time available right? 7. Playing favorites. Again, because the owners have control, you can't really go to anyone if there is any issue. The most egregious example was when everyone was working, the CEO got about half of the team into the conference room to watch a movie, as the other half of the employees had to work. They played the movie so loudly that those that were not invited had to ask the CEO to turn it down. Again, at any normal company, this wouldn't be a big deal. But here, it felt like it was rewarding those that were obedient, and punishing others. It is such a braindead move for any CEO to intentionally divide a team like this, let alone to do it in a way that makes it so hard to work for those that were intentionally excluded. There was another instance of favoritism, when some of the team had to stay late to finish something, and praise was given very publicly and very intently to only some members of the group, and excluded others. It just felt weird, and if it was a one off thing, I wouldn't even care, but when you look at the big picture and combine it with everything else, it feels manipulative. 8. Pay was never raised, and the bonus listed on the offer letter also fell through. The only feedback I was given was that they felt like I didn't care about the company because I didn't eat lunch with them enough. 9. There was a coordinated effort to get positive reviews from employees. They also seem to be trying to play off the low ratings as just one person making multiple Glassdoor accounts. Why would someone keep making fake accounts for a decade? Isn't it more likely that the couple running this company is just simply toxic? Also, where are all of the 2, 3 or 4 star reviews? Little suspicious right? It's all 1 or 5. I wouldn't be surprised if they are making fake accounts themselves to get their score back up. 10. Many of their hires are new grads and people in need of a work visa. Why? Because those people can be more desperate, and more likely to not know that the way this company is ran is atypical. Not to mention, this means you don't very many seniors that you can learn from. 11. Snooping on employees - chat logs were read and could be used against you. I know this because I had an issue with a team lead that was being rude to me, and I talked about it to a teammate over private chat. That rude lead apologized out of the blue, and made a big show of it. Neither of us had mentioned anything to anyone, and we realized that our chat was being monitored. Again, at a normal company this wouldn't necessarily be a surprise, but at Prodigiq, this weird and sneaky behavior was done intentionally make people walk on eggshells. Very manipulative. Overall, it just felt like the CEO and CTO had never been an employee before, and therefore, didn't know how to run a company where employees could get work done. They valued control and obedience above productivity and performance, and that leaves me with the sense that their obscene churn rate is actually a feature, not a bug. They viewed it as the cost of doing business, which is honestly just sad.
