Avantages
- People: There are a lot of really good people at Cricut that want to make something truly amazing. The company has just gotten so weird since going public that most people are spread too thin to care about much. - Customers: The Cricut community is full of amazing people wanting to be creative and share it with others! We sadly broke the flagship product, Design Space, so often that I'm not sure how long the customers will hang around. Many are so frustrated with how often the software breaks that they are ready to go to a different product. - Used to be great: Prior to COVID and going public Cricut was an amazing place to work. We had smaller teams and had frequent and good collaboration. Once we went remote/public they brought in ~20 devs from Ukraine and overnight our teams doubled/tripled in size. We were not prepared for it and it was frustrating to see how many software devs were now managers of off-shore devs and had no idea what to do but still had to deliver features.
Inconvénients
- No career paths: They've said for years that they are working on career paths, but have yet to deliver anything. Most of software is remote in Ukraine so those who are on-shore are just meant to manage them. Which creates a really hard dynamic for those on-shore. They have to manage the remote devs in Ukraine who work very different hours and aren't involved in much of the planning so it falls to the on-shore dev to know everything about what needs to be built but pass it off to the remote dev to build it. - Return to office: This has really hurt Cricut! They are sticking to their guns and several amazing developers have left. They allowed many devs to move away during Covid and didn't make them return. Those who stayed in Utah were then required to return to the office in hopes that collaboration would improve. In software, the reality is that those Utah devs drove into the office to make calls to the remote devs as those are the ones they are collaborating with. Most of the executive team lives in California and when they come to the office they get to stay in a hotel just a few hundred feet away. They don't have to spend 1+ hours in a commute every day. It's obvious that it was mandated by the board but Ashish (CEO) had to make up so many lies before he finally admitted that was the reason. - Hybrid: Cricut still claims to be hybrid but with 4 days in the office and 1 day remote, it feels like they are only keeping that 1 day so they can claim hybrid. They sent out an email with 6 pages of rules about the hybrid schedule. You'll need a lawyer to know if you can possibly work a given day remotely. - Features/Tech Debt: Cricut is so focused on features saving the product that they push for that over everything else. Want to spend 4 weeks slowing a feature down to do it right? Nope, can't do that. Instead, they'll gladly make you spend 8+ weeks to firefight the poorly constructed feature and adding so much technical debt you'll cry. - Middle management: As Cricut grew all of the good developers were forced into middle management. I think they gave them training but it often didn't feel like it. - Stingy: One of Cricut's mantras is being frugal, but they really are just stingy. Any company party was paid for by the employees buying damaged/surplus inventory. For one sale the QA department tried to sell extremely used/damaged mats. Literal garbage! - Diversity: We had a few wonderful women in the software dev. But I noticed how often they were passed over for opportunities like title advancements, salary bumps, or even being able to do their job. Really frustrating to see. A lot of them left.