Basically Amazon at this point - Senior Software Engineer II Compass Employee Review

2.0
16 Jul 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

* Benefits and pay are really great * Some teams have really good managers and intra-team culture * Heavy emphasis on building the right thing for customers * Work life balance is pretty easy to maintain if you enforce your boundaries

Cons

* Almost all leadership in product and engineering come from Amazon * Very top-down decision making (e.g., the CPO can come into a project and demand a feature be prioritized that was shown during user studies to not be what customers actually want) * Zero focus on diversity and inclusion. In fact, it's the opposite. There is a culture of elitism where people from FAANG (specifically, Amazon and Google), and people with degrees in computer science are considered the "gold standard" for engineers. I wish I could rate 0 stars for this because Compass is really, really behind the curve here, with no indication that anybody in leadership cares to make it better. My team hasn't hired a single underrepresented engineer in over a year. * Related to the above, all of our decisions and policies are based on FAANG. Compass is basically a wannabe FAANG at this point. * Career growth opportunities are heavily dependent on what project you're on, how high profile it is, and how much your manager is willing to work through all the red tape for you.

Explore other reviews about Compass

5.0
17 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Forward thinking tech company exploring the cutting edge

Cons

Focused on expansion by any means necessary

2.0
17 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

People are smart. Very much a “move fast and break things” culture which can be refreshing compared to bureaucracy-heavy corporate life. I don’t agree with their values (if they have any) but what they’re doing is unquestionably working - business outlook is strong.

Cons

Leadership will tell you there’s no ego or self-interest involved in their strategy - that is untrue. It’s an extremely heliocentric culture around the CEO. A lot of the work is based around what people they're guessing he’ll like, but there’s no alignment at the outset and something you worked on for weeks/months will be trashed after one look from him. Their mission is ostensibly about empowering agents but they are solving a problem that pretty much no one was complaining about before they started, and which just so happens to work highly in their favor in terms of market share. It’s just business but very disingenuous- don’t believe the hype that it’s altruistic somehow. Also the CEO loves to share his sob story about his single mother upbringing, but simultaneously enacts some of the most anti-parent policies you could think of.

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