I had a hugely negative experience with Cloudsmith relating to some health problems I had about 1.5 months into my employment, which made it hard to work at a computer for extended periods.
The first negative aspect was that they didn't allow you to enroll in health insurance until you pass 3 months' employment (a fact I was not aware of when joining). Despite being open and transparent about the pain I was suffering, and that I would have liked to pursue treatment, there was no flexibility on the enrollment date. Once the 3 months passed, there was a further delay of about 2 weeks for enrollment. In Ireland, if you're without health insurance for longer than 13 weeks, you have to serve a 6-month waiting period before making claims for anything more than GP visits. So this mismanagement meant that I could not access treatment under my health insurance. (this has since changed to health insurance being available to new joiners from day 1, showing that the company understand this was a bonkers way to do things)
The second negative aspect of this was that, due to the health problems, my work delivery was suffering somewhat. Despite this, no accommodations or allowances were made. I was told to "take as many breaks as you need" but this conflicted with the fact that I was still expected to deliver the work on schedule with no extra support or accommodation.
Another negative was, when I inquired about what kinds of entitlements I would have if I needed to take a longer break from work (i.e. income protection, which is a benefit they offer), there was a definite tone shift in communication with the company. After his point, I was essentially put on a PIP and felt like I was being pushed out. I was told that I "had lost the trust of the team" and that there was no clear path to rebuilding it.
Another negative was that, while I had informed the company in February of my health problems, it took until June for anyone to arrange an occupational health assessment (which was after I had sought treatment and paid for it out of pocket, at significant personal expense). When talking to the occupational health doctor, she concluded that I had been working with a disability for ~5 months and included this in her OH report.
Working here with the pressure that was heaped on, on top of the health problems, took a toll on my mental health, and I found the company to be at best uncaring. I've been working for 16+ years in plenty of companies in a variety of industries - this is definitely my most negative professional experience ever. The whole situation was completely mismanaged.
Outside of my own circumstances, I did find that the engineering wing of the company had some very talented people working there, but the culture was such that the team was described by management as being a group of genius 10x'ers who live and breath code. Some of the technical decisions did not bear that out however, and a lot of the engineers seemed to be working into burnout to support the platform and handle the increasing rate of incidents. It felt a bit cult-ish at times.
Also, onboarding is a little bit sink-or-swim, and the pace of development can be hectic at times, but this can be par-for-the-course for startups/scale-ups, so YMMV.
