- The problems starts before you even start. They absolutely will lie to you about compensation and attempt to underpay you right out of the gate.
- The product is a basic proof of concept with barely any real functionality. Like other people have said there's no AI at all. It's stagnant and hasn't had any meaningful changes in the last six years because of the CTO resisting any modernization of the app. Expect to hear "We were the best new app of 2015 on the Apple App Store!" a lot. Nevermind what makes an app good now years later.
- The CEO and CTO have no experience working anywhere except for Lark. They started straight out of college and their lack of leadership experience shows at every level. They both go on long rants with no clear goal of what to say and gaslight employees saying they forgot that they were told about critical issues even when there is recorded evidence that they were told and gave directions on how to proceed. If things work out, they take all the credit. If anything goes wrong, they were never told anything or don't remember and therefore are not responsible.
- The leadership micromanages engineers to the point that it's hard to get anything done. Expect to have the CTO and other leadership disrupt your team every few weeks to force you to explain every line of code in your project so they can give opinions on how your entire team sucks. This is despite their having no familiarity with the language or tech stack that your using. The Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with these people.
-In addition to micromanaging they also like to publicly humiliate teams during the company wide all-hands which is mandatory and happens every day. If they don't feel like they have humiliated you enough they will also post @channel messages to the general/team Slack channels.
- The engineering culture is highly competitive and not collaborative at all. If you can tell the CTO and VPs exactly what they want to hear and bootlick for them, you will be promoted. Try to do your job or explain when a process will result in more bugs and untested code, you will be told that you are too incompetent and junior to understand why they're right. If you give in and do what they want and it predictably results in bugs, that's even more evidence to them that you need to be bullied out so someone "better" can come in. The bootlickers thrive because when something goes wrong they lie and blame others.
In conclusion, Lark engineering is a 1-2 year burnout job. It's a shame because the product idea has so much potential, but with the leadership the company has now it will never be able to fulfill it.
