Engineering Perspective - Engineer Credit Karma Employee Review

I've been a software/infrastructure engineer at Credit Karma for quite some time, and would like to share a few thoughts specifically on the engineering side. After having worked on a few different teams and with just about all of them, I've felt that the variance in terms of quality of the team and final delivered product is fairly high across the engineering organization. This is probably no surprise to anyone who has worked in the environment of a large engineering department before. So do take reviews that make generalizations with a grain of salt, including this one. Personally, I have had very good experiences during my time here- no ridiculous on-call schedule, fair compensation, and various opportunities to learn and grow. But I have also taken initiatives, to varying degrees, over the years to make sure that my experiences are and remain good. It would be unfair to expect that managers will always be able to cater to my expectations without feedback, though I definitely believe that middle-management can be improved in terms of both skill and empathy. Yet at the same time from what I've seen, the communication channels between employees and managers are very robust and one should very much use them for direct feedback. My advice to an engineering candidate is to come to the interview with specific technologies and problems that you want to work with, along with a list of concerns that would make or break your time here and at any other company, and address them directly with your interviewers. The more specific you can be about your ideal engineering environment the better. At worst, the answers that you get become leverage which you can use in the future. For what it's worth, I have fairly good opinions of both the executive team and the company's long-term future.