Pros
Pay is decent I guess although badly unbalanced between regions
Cons
Bullying and targeting against individual employees is common. The company completely fails to protect employees from malicious managers or do any kind of due diligence. Employees are completely at the mercy of managers. In order to advance their own careers, managers PIP and fire employees to make themselves look decisive and like they were actively managing their employees well. Engineering leadership is full of sharks and if you are naive or if you'd just rather keep your head down and do good work you will be easy prey. The culture is bad. The tech stack is completely wrong. It is among the most immature engineering cultures I’ve experienced in my career. A huge chunk of the developers at the company are completely incapable of solving novel problems independently and can only follow established patterns, many of which are bad. Engineering isn’t represented in the C suite at all, the head of engineering reports to the Chief Product Officer. Consequently the company is a feature factory with no engineering vision at the top level. Experienced engineers have been leaving the company in droves lately. The culture feels incredibly corporate and stultifying for the size and age of the company. They are obsessed with process and procedure and leadership micromanages many aspects of day to day team execution like which meetings/ceremonies we have to have and how we plan our work and use JIRA. Almost all the code is in a single application, which is not continuously deployed but is only deployed every hour. Staging releases get manually QAed by a third party company and only released to prod if they pass. So it’s not uncommon for most of the day’s prod deploys to be skipped because the staging deploy isn’t passing QA and the team that owns the bug isn’t being very responsive. And then a huge prod deploy of 300 changes goes out representing the last 24 hours of work. And testing coverage is lacklustre so the odds of that deploy having a production issue are high. There are multiple incidents, rollbacks, and hotfixes most days. There isn’t a clear explicit plan for breaking up the single application into multiple applications, which is the only solution to the problem. There has been a failure to follow any sort of typescript best practices, both due to lack of care and lack of anyone with advanced typescript knowledge at the company until recently. The types are a Lovecraftian monstrosity and it takes 20+ minutes to typecheck the whole application. This is a major reason CI and the merge queue are always backed up. There is headcount allocated to fixing this problem but it’s simply not enough. All the C suite cares about is features, so Engineering Initiatives get short shrift. The CI and deploy pipelines are not scaling. Something breaks nearly every day causing CI and deploys to freeze for hours. The merge queue time hits 2+ hours nearly every day. They are planning to grow from 300 to 500 engineers this year and I can’t imagine how bad it’s going to be. They are not investing nearly enough into DX to support the scale. If you work here, look forward to a multi-day development cycle at all times.
