I am taking some time before writing this review to be able to do a fair job. This is possibly one of the worst place to work in bay area from growth prospective. Engineering is a myth around here, people are rewarded for their time spent here with promotions instead of talent. The ironical part is that almost every one in the company is an applications architect and almost none of them knows about application servers or the infrastructure. Most of them have worked with only one or two applications for their entire life time so its not hard to tell the reason. To be fair to them, they have adapted to the culture to earn those positions. Sounds more like selling your soul to the devil. The applications original architecture is not so bad if one can see through it, clearly the people who wrote it had a vision in mind. But down the line people abused the code without understanding which is why it is in such a pathetic state today. There is no scope of learning and improving your skillet unless you are a self learner, forget about possibility of changing anything at all.
A lot of people make a living by acting as guard dogs to the entries of different resources, no wonder they have a job security. Classical example is the devops/sysops. Traditionally these roles are for the support where they help engineers with the system administration and provisioning of resources. Unfortunately they have taken the reins in their hands for the technology because the technical leadership is non existent. Their goal is to avoid any new additions to their work load which effectively means scuttling any new product or application by any possible means. Almost for everything they have a suggestion to make which is buying some solutions off the shelf instead of writing any code for one simple reason - they do not have to maintain anything.
The root cause is not hard to find. The executives here have made enough money and they do not have any ambitions to change the state of the things. Its definitely in their best interests to continue this as long as they can.
