Pros
- Remote forever - It is a layer 1 protocol - VERY smart and innovative colleagues - Benefits and pay are decent but managed poorly - Cool product with interesting technical challenges - You'll get rich if you are given enough NEAR tokens - You can stake your $NEAR while it is vesting to earn rewards @ ~15% APY
Cons
- A great deal of ambiguity to navigate but in a bad way. Structure and general processes do not exist (you'll be flying blind). If, while flying blind, you make decisions in order to do your job, expect to have to reverse them. - The culture at NEAR is terrible and very crypto-anarchist (no diversity of thought and very little non crypto native representation). - They do not value work-life-balance despite saying they do and leave no room for improvement because they are very picky regarding whom they hire; regularly turning down qualified candidates. If you're not an engineer from Eastern Europe with an ICPC medal you'll have a hard time. - Leadership is very inexperienced. Despite that they seem to care about input from other employees but, unfortunately, have no follow-through. - Leadership make sweeping decisions which impact employees negatively constantly. Things like laying team members off (with no backfill), removing intrinsic tools like Slack, or changing the company within NEAR you report to (which impacts benefits and time off) - Employee experience seems to mean nothing to NEAR. For example: they do not try to provide value to employees through company events or cool perks like a week off during COVID, etc. Also, some US holidays are not observed. - I never felt like my voice was heard during my time at NEAR. - If you're not an engineer, good luck!
