Pros
The part of the business that isn't running on PHP has been guided by some excellent technical decision making from the original tech leadership. Elixir and React have been successfully adopted. The product offering to their existing customers (childcare industry) is good - in theory it has a lot of potential to scale to other parts of education industry and grow as a business. Good location. Office is nice enough.
Cons
Developers started leaving the company a while back and haven't really stopped. I can't speak for others but for me it was mostly due to pretty erratic and sometimes completely bizarre leadership. The CEO/founder is an energetic salesman for the product but doesn't have much insight into tech. He's also created a culture where it's impossible to talk about problems of any kind, technical, business or interpersonal, because only positivity and enthusiasm are acceptable at Xplor. This means major issues don't get dealt with, and senior staff raising concerns don't get listened to. There's a giant disconnect between the spin that gets put out (publicly and top down inside the company) and the reality of the product and what's happening in development. I've worked with a few startups so I know part of it is being ambitious and selling the vision. But this has led to making teams scramble to fulfil unrealistic promises that change week to week, which is always going to cause problems eventually. As well as the overtime and interpersonal stress that this creates, it also forces technical shortcuts and makes it harder to have a long term technical strategy, especially when it makes developers leave. When people have chosen to leave, they've always been treated like traitors in the process. It's weird, un-necessary, and a bit cultish. When developers stay, they often have to take on the work of those who left, as not enough new devas are being brought in. Developers are also consistently required to do manual, menial tasks, that could easily be automated with better planning and communication. I don't have a problem with working hard but hard work is not a cure for poor decision making and communication. There's a lot of emphasis and resources put into showmanship and sales like literal fireworks, backup dancers, and expensive venues for product launches that few people were ever going to attend. It feels like the CEO is caught up in this excitement and doesn't know how to prioritise projects or understand issues. When issues did come up, he often responded with aggression or paranoia. It was unsettling to see these sudden cracks in the usual perky positivity and enthusiasm. It was an environment where we didn't feel like we could say what was on our minds or work effectively. I couldn't recommend it to anyone. If you're thinking about working here, you have to know that this is a workplace with deep problems that aren't about to go away. Read the 5 star reviews here with a bucket of salt. While at work staff are asked to write reviews here and also reviews of the product.