Vantaggi
In terms of a safe and comfortable workspace, iFixit does a decent job. Some pros: clean office, friendly coworkers, flexible schedule, some hybrid remote work options, basic benefits package, major holidays are paid time off, food provided a couple times a week. Kind of the standard stuff for the modern times. Depending on your team/manager, work-life balance can be great. Some teams do better than others. Looks like the software engineers, developers, marketing, socials, etc. have been fully remote for quite a while. That's a plus if those are your fields. They're usually pretty great about getting you what you need to work comfortably, and there were some various stipends/perks that may or may not exist anymore. More on that in the "Cons" section. No political pressure or general issues in the workplace, so that's nice. Diversity is a bit lacking, but they generally seem to be open to it. There is PTO, but it's accrued rather than refreshed, and it starts very low for new employees (takes 5+ years to finally get up to a decent amount of annual PTO). Definitely something they can do better with in this generation. CA finally forced companies to offer employees 5 sick days a year, so that was a godsend. Being able to be sick without worrying about losing pay or using your hard-earned holiday hours is amazing. Thank you, California.
Svantaggi
TLDR at bottom. iFixit does fall short in a lot of ways. For being a small, ~23-year-old company started by a college student, it's still trying to find its identity. I'll try to be honest without being overly negative. When I first started at iFixit, it seemed like a really cool place to work. That honeymoon phase was short-lived though. There's a lot of gatekeeping and a serious lack of communication & coordination across teams/departments. There's no real mentorship, and everyone seems to be disconnected on what they're doing. When you're creating content for literally thousands of products, this makes things pretty chaotic, to say the least. There doesn't seem to be any real plan, and everyone is so overworked that "don't bother the other team with that" was kind of a running roadblock. We were often crunching on seemingly endless projects with pretty absurd expectations (the owner loves the whole MBA "be more productive with less!" motto and has recently been AI-focused to a fault). That came along with an expectation to basically never ask for raises, and with the high COL for SLO County, that was pretty demoralizing. Typical wages are well below $30hr, which falls severely short of both industry standards and what's needed to live in the county (even just renting). Fast food and restaurants are nearing that now. Student-hiring is a big thing as Cal Poly is nearby, and it seems like the ownership leans heavily on that to keep wages low rather than seek or retain talent (my friends have internships with nearby companies that offer way better). There's actually an iFixit team that uses unpaid students to create free content too, but we never really knew much about it. Roles and positions aren't clearly defined, and the ownership insists on maintaining a "flat" hierarchy, which creates major issues for project management and career advancement opportunities. Even if you get a "senior" position, you're basically in title only with no change & still the same exact workflow. Career opportunities don't exist. When more work or new skillsets are asked of you, none of it is structured in relation to industry pay or value as an employee; you're just expected to do it for free. The few positions that are paid well seem to be long-time friends of the two owners, and they don't seem to be going anywhere. Sideways is basically the only way to go at iFixit. The "iFixit family" thing is pushed sometimes, but we all know how that goes. For the last couple years, we've had profit sharing (a big perk offered at the time of hiring) and raises removed. So, really, everyone has taken pay cuts each year due to inflation and the increase in COL across the country. This is in stark contrast with the actions of ownership, as the owner/CEO showed off on company chat with his new "affordable" $800,000 house he recently purchased in TN (one of many of his properties, along with huge acreage on the central coast) after dropping $24million on a new company warehouse in the same state. He started offering some of my colleagues the opportunity to live with him while they relocated to TN, and personally I found that to be super unprofessional and more than a bit compromising (especially if you're a woman). This was around the same time they were telling us that they were expanding, making deals with major brands, continuing to hold company parties, offering to fly people to TN to check out the area (I'm assuming in hopes that they could relocate them and pay them less), and that everything was great. Then the narrative started shifting to, 'oh, by the way, now suddenly we're struggling, and we have to tighten our belts.' We were all kind of wondering why we were being told how well the company was doing but then suddenly told to not expect raises or COL adjustments. Some people started challenging that, and someone was actually fired for asking about the owner's wages around that time. The atmosphere in the company shifted to one of unease and distrust, and it got really awkward. All kinds of rumors started flying around, and people were talking about unionizing and striking. A lot of us were really confused as a lot of this information was being put out over the months, because it didn't seem to line up. We'd always get vague or cryptic answers though, and direct inquiries were redirected or ignored entirely. There were some annual stipends and hiring perks, (like a one-time $400 stipend for a bicycle to commute to work on, and an annual $300 "wellness" stipend for things like running shoes or anything that would help your mental health). I don't know if those have been rescinded as well since the layoffs. TLDR: SLO is expensive. iFixit doesn't come close to paying enough to live here, even for career-level positions (way below industry standards). After working our tails off and being assured repeatedly that there would be no lay-offs, the owners announced a callous and detached "global workforce reduction" with no heads-up (which was a bit pretentious, seeing as how this is only a ~200 person company)--just a one-way Zoom call and 'collect your things on the way out.' No career advancement opportunities. Flat hierarchy with nepotism at the "top." Heavy workload expectations for not nearly enough pay. Owners spend a ton of money and own multiple properties, hold company parties, and lobby in politics, but employees are told not to expect raises.