Pros
Your coworkers will be very smart and pleasant people. There are some interesting problems to work on.
Cons
The biggest problem for engineers is you’ll have to spend a LOT of time working on uninteresting bugfixes, performance degradations, and stability work. Most engineers spend the majority of their time on this uninteresting work. No company has a perfect code base and 0 bugs to solve, but there are organizational shortcomings making the problem worse at Ocient than it should be. It’s alarming how much new low quality and under tested code continues to get written and introduced. A lot of your time will go to cleaning up other people’s mistakes. You will likely get siloed into one very specific area and have a primary job function of maintaining that even when there’s no new functionality to be added there. Extremely high turnover in engineering. Not enough engineering managers. Little prioritization of developer productivity (e.g. awful build times). Lots of uninteresting work assigned to you. Company feels slow moving (not nearly as fast paced as you might expect from a startup). Low pay (it’s not awful, but if you’re smart enough to get hired at ocient, you’re more than capable of getting something higher paying). Unclear business outlook. Little recognition given to people for their work.