Poor employee utilization, cronyism reigns supreme
Pros
The company provides excellent benefits (including visa sponsorship) and flexibility with time off, etc. Overall, I felt the company cares about employees at a high level. The company's product and platform will continue to be successful for years to come, so company/job security is practically a given.
Cons
At a low level, the company doesn't provide very well for individual employee success. Personally, I found myself frequently without clear direction or understanding of how I could be most useful. It's a frustrating feeling to watch other people work overtime to get things done when I wasn't able to contribute. Reasons for this are many, but chief among them is an extremely complex API architecture, the likes of which I've never seen before. A quick example, to add one property onto an API endpoint, it's necessary to update at least 3 different C# classes, update indices on Elastic "search", update Redis, and clear/rebuild caches, and then *maybe* it will work. I should have run away when I saw a task to add a checkbox be estimated as a 3 in agile planning. In addition to this, I have to specifically call out the "platform architecture" team for being just the worst. This team is in charge of new development technologies, but they aren't necessarily the best people in the company to be doing so. They have their jobs as a result of cronyism, and they've all been at the company for a decade or more. They don't have social skills and will bristle at anyone asking questions to them about how to use their architecture, or asking why they've chosen to do things a certain way. This team has to change or more people will leave.
