Politics: The highly political sway of Walmart influence drives scary technical decisions --when you look at the decisions at the ground level there is a vast amount of malfunction. If you publicly voice a competing design or proposal, you find yourself shut down and marginalized. Symbotic's executive leadership comes from the grocery chain industry, not technology/engineering. As a result, the engineering language and impact is lost in translation.
High Turnover: In less than a year, the entire interview team of 9+ people I interviewed with was gone. The only exception was the hiring manager, but that person transitioned into a different role. Additionally, the company is heavily leveraged in off-shore software consulting, which also plays a highly problematic role in the retention of key domain knowledge.
Deep Technical Debt: The software stack used for >90% of the systems has long become obsolete or end of life. The nature of the monolithic software architecture makes it impossible to rectify since the extreme inter-coupling of systems requires massive, "big-bang" updates that are risky and error prone. The codebase is likely to remain this way indefinitely or until the company hires an external agency to rebuild it from the ground-up in parallel to maintaining the existing infrastructure. The system is a case study for Tracy Kidder's non-fiction work "The Soul of a New Machine".
