Smoke, trap contracts and ego.: opiniones de empleados con el puesto de Machine Learning Developer en Multiverse Computing

This company lives off the big dream of quantum computing and cutting-edge AI. My personal experience didn’t match that narrative. BUSINESS MODEL During my time there, the work I witnessed firsthand consisted mainly of taking open source models and compressing them. Based on what I observed, my personal impression is that there was a notable gap between how the product was communicated externally and what I saw internally on a day-to-day basis. I also got the sense, from what I perceived of the environment, that funding rounds and external financing played a very significant role in keeping the business afloat. I don’t have access to the accounts, so this is just my reading as an employee. And honestly, the messaging from leadership struck me as overblown: I heard internal comparisons to OpenAI and Mistral that, in my opinion, were hard to take seriously given what I saw day to day. To me it sounded like a lot of PowerPoint and very little substance. WAY OF WORKING For its size, it struck me as absurdly bureaucratic and slow and chaotic at the same time, which is quite an achievement. I saw constant duplicated work across teams, which I attribute to very poor internal communication. MANAGERS What stuck with me most was what I perceived as a tendency to avoid confronting mistakes: serious failures, especially in management, gave me the impression of being overlooked rather than acknowledged and corrected. My sense was that people who delivered quickly and without pushback were valued more , even if the work was riddled with errors, than those who wanted to do things properly. My personal read, and only that, is that the priority seemed to be showcasing flashy progress (PoC, demos) rather than building something solid for the long term. The product and technical managers I dealt with were, for the most part and in my perception, profiles without a strong technical background. I got the impression they mainly acted as intermediaries upward, and I missed having more direct communication between leadership and the people doing the actual work. Personally, I found it frustrating. CULTURE A culture I would describe as highly political and appearance-driven: in my experience, looking busy and being well-liked mattered more than actual results. The level of control I experienced felt excessive: I noticed a lot of attention to clocking in and out, breaks, and physical presence. Very little remote work and, in my opinion, very little trust in employees. I also noticed a strong preoccupation with controlling the external message: I got the impression there were implicit — and sometimes explicit — expectations around how to refer publicly to the product’s technical capabilities, including avoiding certain terminology that didn’t fit the image they wanted to project. My personal reading is that public image carried more weight than fully transparent communication about what the product actually was. HEAVY USE OF TEMPORARY CONTRACTS During my time there and I was fixed-term I got also the impression that a very large portion of the workforce was on temporary contracts which is strange. In the hiring process I perceived a message of stability and meaningful projects that, in my experience, didn’t always match reality — I was not even working on the project listed in my fixed-term contract. Renewals, from what I could observe, didn’t seem to be based primarily on performance, dedication, quality, or ownership. I perceived opaque criteria, contradictory signals, and an environment where, in my opinion, speaking openly about the situation didn’t feel safe. The result, in my view, was a climate I experienced as toxic, competitive, and low-trust. OTHER THINGS Overall, in my experience I felt a culture of high turnover, with a fairly constant fear of being let go that, for me, only added to the already tense atmosphere. Advice: If you’re looking for a serious place to do real deep tech work in a healthy environment, in my experience this is not it. What I found was a lot of propaganda, little real product for what was promised, and quite a few burned-out people. There are companies where talent is genuinely valued — this one, in my personal experience, was not one of them.