The last "pro" really gets to the heart of it: you, as a happy, successful, productive person, are not a problem they are interested in solving. Your success will only come at the mercy of Lightspeed's aggressive, cutthroat business goals. What you want and how you feel do not matter because those things do not fit on the roadmap. And management isn't competent or motivated enough (let alone allowed) to prioritize anything else.
If that kind of capitalism-at-the-expense-of-everything-else work excites you, you'll feel right at home. The company is simply too overgrown and bloated from acquisitions to establish a good, lasting culture. It's all window dressing and finger crossing. They are endlessly playing catchup from all those acquisitions and your wellbeing and job security are in jeopardy because of it.
This is probably the norm at lots of tech companies right now, sure. But Lightspeed didn't have any great unified culture to begin with, nothing to fall back on after half a dozen sloppy and badly integrated acquisitions.
You may find success as an engineer at Lightspeed if you enjoy:
- Competing with your peers instead of collaborating with them
- Pulling rank and viewing every interaction as hierarchical
- Being evaluated based on fuzzy, purely political metrics like "visibility"
- Carefully guarding what you say publicly for fear of retaliation or perception
- Drama, high rates of turnover, and constantly shifting goal posts
- Working in a stressful environment lacking honest, direct feedback
- Prioritizing DX over UX
- Complexity as a virtue
I'm sure there are good engineering teams/squads/pockets at the company. Some of the acquired companies that didn't hemorrhage employees were able to maintain much of what worked for them. If you're lucky, you may find yourself on one of those teams. Do you want to take the risk that you don't? If the past is any predictor of the future, the company will continue to endure significant leadership shakedowns, mass layoffs, and long periods of volatility and instability. Despite the amount of cash they allege to have in the bank, they behave like a company that's desperate.
