Meta reviews

The internal career system seems well intended and fair at first, until you try to follow it. Very poor work-life balance. I've never worked so much in my entire career, yet it never seems enough to satisfy the criteria to grow up internally. All internal systems are custom made and many times they compare poorly to open-source alternatives, specially from usability and stability perspective. Which means you will spend a long time to master the internal tooling and all that hard-earned knowledge will be worthless when you leave the company. Also, that all engineers have so much freedom means that everyone is constantly reinventing the wheel, and increasing the overall complexity of the environment thus changes harder and harder as time goes by. This is exacerbated by the bonus system, which for many years has encouraged engineers to build and deliver new things rather than fixing existing issues. All of this combined has lead to a monstrous internal ecosystem which is a huge pile of entangled hair, where the simplest of tasks requires careful planning and understanding and will take several days. Management has lately changed the incentives to encourage fixing and better quality, but it's too little too late.

Oppressive twice a year reviews that have employees turn on each other and management. Bottoms up leadership means there is no leadership. Zero direction, multiple people working on the same project in silos. Innovation hostile even though management talks about innovation all the time. If you are not young Asian, white or Indian you may be uncomfortable. The 5% of toxic employees do a lot of damage because there are so many nice people. My group, strange as it may seem is very conservative with a lot of ex-military. This mind set perhaps works for the military, but not a tech company in a rapidly changing world.