Thank you for your feedback, both the pros and cons. I enjoyed reading the critical feedback because it’s a great opportunity to reflect on how we do things. I’d like to address each of your points to hopefully provide some clarity on the topics you raised.
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The product is nothing more than a bloated CRUD app. There are parts of the our main platform that are focused on configuration and, in these interactions, there is a strong bent towards CRUD (create, read, update, delete). However, the majority of our platform provides domain specific capabilities where CRUD is not an accurate characterization of the approach we take. For instance, inventory recall, lot/expiry traceability, quality control, production scheduling, labour optimization, and integration with other enterprise systems. Perhaps you didn’t get a chance to work on the more complex parts of the system during your time here and so I can understand why you have the impression of “bloated CRUD”.
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The code is in a … questionable state I agree with you that some areas of the code are in a questionable state. I probably wrote chunks of it :). And I’d add that some of the areas of the code are in a great state. For us, this is the nature of the beast in software. The more we continuously learn about how to write great software, the more the code that we wrote in the past can be improved. We spend time either in our TDD cycle or explicitly tackling tech debt in order to convert our learnings into practice. If you were to time travel and see our code in the future, I’m sure you’ll see a better version of it
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The infrastructure team is incredibly dubious and unprofessional I’d love to hear from you how you think our infrastructure team can be improved since “dubious” and “unprofessional” doesn’t give me or the Glassdoor readers much to go on. My personal experience with them is that they are professionals that care A LOT about the reliability of our systems, the well-being of the company, and learning best practices.
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A lot of Nulogy engineers think it’s the cream of the crop I think there are many things that we do well and there are many things we are working on improving. I think we have a lot of discipline with automated testing, pairing, and we place a lot of emphasis on productive collaboration. On the flip side, we have a road ahead of us in terms of devops transformation and structured performance management. Overall, we really value team safety and we think that is something you don’t find at every workplace e.g. we had our annual Open Space last night which was an amazing way to connect the entire company.
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Experienced devs vs bootcamp grads At Nulogy, we value diversity. One of the dimensions of diversity is industry experience. People with more experience can always learn from having a beginner’s mind and we find that bootcamp grads have a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity that help push our team. In fact, we have run an apprenticeship program at Nulogy to help bootcamp grads grow the skills they need to be successful on the job. That being said, there is actually only one person on our team that is a bootcamp grad and has become a solid contributor the team. The remainder of the engineering team has a range of experience, from 2 to 30+ years coming from startups, large companies, and growth companies which we believe is a diverse, well balanced, foundation.
If you’ve made it to the end of my response, thanks for reading! As a co-founder and engineering lead, I care deeply that our company is represented accurately in the community at large. If anyone interested in Nulogy wants to learn more, I’m happy to answer your questions.
Jason Yuen, CTO jasony@nulogy.com