About the Design team -
You will be constantly bullied, your designs will be insulted in team reviews, and that will just be the beginning. Feedback will be frustratingly inconsistent -- one week your designs will be amazing, the next week "horrible". Crudely expressed criticisms of your work may also be posted on the team slack channels (especially Eng and PM channels). Things tend to get much, much worse during your 1-1s.
One might assume the bullying is only focused on the old team -- unfortunately, new hires are not spared. There are some exceptions of course. If you are a favorite, you'll get free reign and receive a "Specialty Role". That's a real title, communicated officially. Yes, I wish I was kidding.
The whole thing is set up to make you feel incompetent. Yearly reviews serve to exhibit your failings and brush your achievements under the rug. I initially thought this was unique to me, but then I asked multiple teammates. It is almost indiscriminately a demoralizing process.
Cross-functional collaboration is so bad that half of the product team does not want design reviews. Most projects get derailed during design reviews. There have been cases of PMs keeping the design org in the blind and shipping work without approval. The designer is subsequently publicly shamed.
Then there are occasional displays of toxic behavior from leadership. Fingers are pointed at everyone from HR to PMs, Eng leads and even exec staff so that the design leadership can avoid taking ownership or accountability for their own mistakes.
On the bright side, these things don't happen every day, just once a week.
The design leadership also practices what could be best described as whimsical decision-making. There have been multiple instances where they turned from actively growing/hiring a team (under the design umbrella) to laying off the whole team within just 2-4 weeks. None of these layoffs seemed strategic or funding-related, and they didn't turn into more headcounts in the design org. Basically when the leadership finds it hard to show any work progress, it throws "non-designer" roles under the bus as a distraction.
In a notable instance, the entire user research team was sacrificed. Needless to say, the leadership does not believe in user research and makes stuff up about user behavior, because "that's how Apple does it". (That's the unofficial design principle.) Speaking of Apple, Steve Jobs (RIP) influences most of the design decisions at ThoughtSpot. The irony here being Steve Jobs was not a designer.
I have witnessed a new low of ineptitude. Earning top dollar. In a private, for-profit company. In a ruthless industry. It is sad to see terms like "poor performance" and "inability to handle the work" are selectively applied to non-management roles. The exec staff has to be aware of some, if not all, of this mess. They seem to be unable or unwilling to correct it.
Hope there is a real change soon. I wish I was warned about all this.
