- Top and middle management are ineffective and opaque to employees; they just want to feel good about themselves
- It's a wonder how they manage to get employees to trust in their vision. The company mission was not easy to visualize. Not many people seem to understand.
- As an engineer, it is unlikely that you will learn hottest skillsets of the time. Quantcast does some machine learning but it is not the AI powerhouse as some reviewers call it. Nor is it the best company to learn distributed systems. They say "big data" but it's not that hot (or hard) anymore.
- Because of the above, the breadth and depth of your skillset can vary depending on your team. Some people get in as very good engineers and leave as bad engineers. It's hard to translate the skills you use at Quantcast to those required by other companies, and even if you get lucky, it's even more difficult to be the most sought-after assets. If you want to do cool things, you must be at companies working on the hottest problems. If you want to build core skillsets, you must be at companies with a variety of learning opportunities. Quantcast is not the strongest in either one of those.
- Work is all politics. Engineers (especially ML engineers) do nothing interesting due to bottlenecks from office politics and favoritism by managers
- Some managers don't care about wellbeing of their subordinates. They want to feel powerful and that's why they stay. Some of them are new and are not trained well. Some of them don't have people skills. Some simply follow the books and don't know how to manage people. Good ones who care either become one of those bad ones, or leave early.
- Programmatic advertising (imho) passed its peak and hence almost no upward potential for your career from company growth. So don't expect to grow as the company scales; if you imagine Airbnb, the chances are you are wrong.
- Some products have rooms to improve and it's possible to do better. But no one wants to speak up because telling the truth will make people angry. The culture is set in such a way that any critical thinking on their product is not welcome. Flatter may not help the company, but it will help you.
- On the same line as above, if you still want to join, you must pretend problems don't exist so that the management, 30000 feet above the ground, wouldn't notice it. If you care too much, you won't do well at Quantcast. If managers can't feel good about themselves because you question them, they will blame you for everything that is or is not an issue.
- Every moment of post-mortem is a grilling session. For those who don't know what post-mortem is, it's a meeting in which people should go over any past issues (e.g. server failures). Some managers at Quantcast use it to blame engineers who work for other managers they don't get along with. Being good at blaming and embarrassing engineers is a must.
- Fraternity culture. Heavy drinking, heavy hangout. If you enjoy it, this can be an advantage. But remember that give or take exceptions, post-work drinking somewhat relates to your "performance" - it happens in many places and Quantcast doesn't look like an exception. You have to get in the right group otherwise your life can be hard. Well, same is true for many other companies. Quantcast is one of them that doesn't address the problem correctly.
- Favoritism is conspicuous. And it hurts. Won't get into much details here because it can feel serious. Just know that it can hurt your feelings and trigger you to leave. Enough said on this.
- The performance review is scheduled so that your politics is rewarded at least as much as results. Regardless of how much results you deliver, you will not be promoted unless managers approve your "sphere of influence". Easy to write down but implemented differently at every company. Quantcast seems to use this principle very politically and consequently wrong people get promoted while good people leave.
- The company celebrates meetings. More time is spent on meetings than doing work. There were a sizable number of people who start the conversation by "let's schedule a meeting", or "let's meet to prepare for the standup". There were meetings, and pre-meetings, and meetings for meetings. And of course, how often you schedule meetings is one way to measure your influence.
- Meetings might look bad for engineers who need to focus, but since there's not much engineering to the product, selling (yes, selling) your product to non-engineers (e.g. ops, sales) takes higher priority. So if you like selling your product to people at your own company, this may not be that bad. Some people love it, and their perspectives should be respected as well.
- Middle management doesn't want to address issues in their technology in fear of exposing themselves to blame. It is possible to wonder if the management would rather have engineers sit around than do something. This is probably due to lack of trust in their culture.
- Couple of managers love to show off their power. These people have been at Quantcast for a very long time and contributed to building their culture. They can be really rude if they feel their authorities are challenged. If you can hurt your self-esteem by having your manager being extremely rude to you, make sure you get a good person to manage you. Some people (as in many other places in the world) go to work to simply "feel powerful".
- They don't pay well. They can tell candidates to take a paycut to work at Quantcast because everyone is getting paid less for "amazing work". You can guess how wonderful the work environment would be at a company that doesn't want to "invest" in you. Do extensive cost-benefit analysis on whether the "awesome work" at Quantcast is worth your paycut.
- Too many layers of management. Due to the intense office politics across the company and the kind of people it attracts, lots of engineers want to shift to management. The company promotes them to keep them, who are then coached by existing (toxic) managers.
