Pluspunten
Interesting technical problems to solve in a supportive environment. The people are of the Human kind, so that comes with entailments: some are hard to work with, but most are fantastic, and everyone is doing their best with what they have. The platform is rich in data, and there is so much potential to do cool and interesting things with it. Senior management is smart, and well-intentioned. Middle management, from my experience on the dev side, is compassionate and understanding. On the whole, Textio is a good place to work. It's not without it's flaws, but show me the workplace that is.
Minpunten
Look, here's the thing: I'm a former employee posting mostly in reaction to the recent stream of negative reviews from disgruntled former employees. Even before Covid layoffs, there were frustrations around product direction, professional recognition, the pressures of working for an ambitious startup, etc. There's a lot of emphasis on optics at Textio, and understandably that doesn't sit well with some people. It can come off as shallow and prescriptivist. When your views fail to align with leadership or the perceived Textio mainstream, you can feel personally judged, or discounted on a technicality. I felt that way sometimes at textio. I think there is also a strong, unintentional, kool-aid culture going on. Raising real concerns can be hard, because the individual feels like they are going against the grain, like they are the only one with reservations about things that have been said, or decisions that have been made. I don't know how you break that. Everybody individually is a real person and as such they will have differing views. But nobody wants to get marked as an outsider. So because everyone hired at textio is so supposedly low-ego, we accommodate, we don a mask and make replies with an extra dose of enthusiasm. That's exhausting to keep up, and I think a lot of the negative reviews on glassdoor are from folks who are taking their first breath of fresh air after finally being able to remove that mask. Textio's biggest problem is communication: giving and receiving. I don't think management and the culture is intentionally stifling, but that does not negate the experiences of many employees, former and current. To be clear, I don't think Textio is on average worse than anywhere else at these things. At the very least, one could take comfort in knowing that they are definitely working at a Human company comprised of Real Humans, as opposed to the Martian infiltrators from the future who take over our beloved Earth 1000 years from now and invent time travel in order to harvest some of that sweet sweet Human Productivity they've heard so much about.
