There are some big downsides to Lower. Not going to sugar-coat anything here.
1. Pay and benefits are not on-par with the rest of the industry. If you're looking for FAANG-level compensation, do not apply. The 401k match is a joke. Healthcare is so-so. My personal salary is nice, but I know I could make more elsewhere. I had to fight and show other offers to get 4 weeks vacation. The company standard was bumped to 3 weeks. My original offer had 2 weeks.
2. The house market is potentially taking a nose dive as of June 30th of 2022. This isn't great for mortgage lenders. Engineering has not been impacted other than a hiring freeze, but morale has been low for the rest of the company because of layoffs. Lower's leadership has conducted themselves better than Better.com and other lenders that had MASSIVE layoffs.
3. I don't think other employees and executives outside of engineering understand the value that a good product organization can provide. Make no mistake -- Lower is not a tech company. Lower is an old-school mortgage lender masquerading as a trendy tech startup with cool T-shirts and a stadium. Our CEO has a background in traditional lending with Homeside, and I think we're still figuring out how to best leverage our newly-acquired engineering talent. Engineering is outnumbered by sales folks 25 to 1. Mortgage lending is a high-touch industry due to its nature, but I think we can do more to make our sales team more efficient and communicate our value internally as well as to our customers.
4. There were some "initiatives" that were fruitless and wasteful that launched soon after I joined. These initiatives were not started by engineering, but it was frustrating to see contractors hired to deliver a product that did literally 0.
5. We struggle to ship some features because we struggle to find someone who understands how the rest of the business operates start-to-finish. We still ship things that work well, it just takes longer than it should to track down X or Y person from operations who MAY have some idea who we should talk to and we often get referred to the person who we talked with originally.
6. When I first joined Lower, we let go or coached out several engineers. It was depressing.
