Independence is great, but management lacks accountability
Pros
A lot of independence, even for an E4. Though I wouldn’t extrapolate much from that as your team and especially manager can vastly change your experience here. Other than that, in hindsight, the expectations are pretty straightforward on a high level. How that boils down to real projects at a practical level is where that gets tricky and where you can get screwed if your manager isn’t setting clear goal posts for you — which is an expectation of them and something you can and should hold them accountable for with upper management if they’re not. Broadly, it’s not as bad as people make it out to be. Can even be pretty chill, but maybe that’s why they laid me off, so go figure.
Cons
In my case there didn’t seem to be much accountability for management. My manager had one of the worst ratings in the company there my first half and in my opinion there was not much done by upper management to ensure he did materially better next time around. In fact, they mostly were just as unhelpful. Despite at my level (E4) there was an expectation that there’d be more people assigning me work than me finding it myself, I basically got non of the former my first half and was only marginally better second half.
