Pros
The people doing the work day in and day out are good people. The engineers and designers I worked with were collaborative and understanding; they desired to do the right thing. Leadership, unfortunately, though does not recognize those doing the work or quite frankly care.
Cons
Honestly the worst and most toxic environment I have ever worked in. Absolutely no appreciation for good work or independent thought. The company has sketchy morals and will do anything to make a sale. They don’t actually care if their product is good or helping people. Money runs the ship, not the user experience. They commit to things like DE&I long enough for a good PR stunt but there is no substance. They say they are agile, but they don’t understand agile principles. There is no commitment to velocity or getting tickets done in a sprint. The code is an old monolith, and leadership is slow to make foundational investments to change it and tech debt is rampant. Also as a PM it is very important to be able to report on very basic user behavior and analytics. But such little investment has been made there, that you have to make ad-hoc requests to data science to find out things as simple as how many users logged into the platform in the last month and from where. There is a quarterly OKR cycle that is based on sounding good rather than doing good. More time is spent planning than anything else. And forget moving forward with innovative ideas. Everything has to be approved by sales, which runs a fear based ship. If there is a product improvement that MIGHT have a negative impact on a small minority subset of users’ perception of the product — forget it. Instead of addressing the root problem that may be impacting users, they try to hide it and leadership won’t support incremental improvements or even testing because of a fear based on assumptions, not proof. At one point I had 10 standing meetings a week with different overlaps of departments just to give status updates. Please stop micromanaging. You hired people to do a job. Let them do that. It’s such a repetitive waste to constantly have to prove your are doing work and making progress. That lack of trust and belief in your employees is apparent and exhausting. Additionally, leadership does NOT celebrate launches or big wins. I had to beg my bosses to write notes to the team congratulating them on a launch or even taking 30 minutes for a zoom happy hour. Multiple times after launches where I’d been awake for 24 hours+, I’d meet with my boss that day and they’d just immediately start talking about the next thing I should be doing and how behind I already was on that. No acknowledgment of what had just been launched. If you like sounding busy and speak business jargon well, you may be okay. But don’t expect to receive acknowledgment of work that actually has an impact — especially if you proved leadership wrong on an assumption with that work. There is no accountability. Favorites are played. Obsequious order takers do really well. Don’t expect your boss to understand the complexities of the code, how long it actually takes to find answers, and to do things well. They’ll deride you publicly and have unrealistic expectations. There is no leading by example. They may not be able to do it it or maintain the standard set for you, but you had better or else. Literally was threatened with Performance Improvement Plans multiple times. I was bullied and threatened multiple times. I would not recommend working here to my worst enemy. No one deserves to be treated the way I was — especially as a passionate employee who really cares. Fortunately, it does look like people are starting to stick up for themselves and leave the environment. Also, HR is useless. They have NO IDEA what is happening in their departments and they don’t care. Like most of the culture, HR does a good job with sounding good and doing pithy things. They have events throughout the week and a meditation break for example, which would be nice if anyone could take the time to attend, but when you don’t even have enough breaks in meetings in the day for lunch there is really no point. I’d have meetings from 9AM to 5PM and then actually start my work. Unlimited PTO sounds nice until it is denied. Some departments take it to heart. Engineering could take 3 weeks off no problem. But I had PTO for 2 days that was strongly discouraged multiple times. Unlimited PTO is really just a ploy to not have to pay out vacation days. Finally HR has very little commitment to continuing education or employee growth. It is important to invest in your employees and that means more than just a random Udemy course. Bring in experts. Have team trainings. Don’t hire people into management roles with no direction. The product has a lot of potential, so it is sad to be blocked in so many ways. As stated in my pros the people at my level or below were really great people, but when leadership is sour it permeates the whole culture.
