Culture of exploitation, deception and broken promises - Senior Software Engineer Yammer Employee Review

Everything about Yammer was great. People, product, ambition

It was intense at times

* Wonderful people. Some of the best people I've ever worked with. Smart, friendly, easy-going. * Great work/life balance. Low drama environment leads to a pleasant workday. The company is mostly not-deadline driven, so the pace of work is rarely breakneck. * Management is generous and easy to get along with. * No email to deal with. Nobody in Yammer sends each other email. Everyone uses Yammer, which is better than email. * Total compensation is generous * Almost nobody uses Windows at a Microsoft-owned company -- all laptops are Macs * Gorgeous huge spacious office * Generously stocked food, free lunch and dinner. * Fun hackdays & offsites

* The product is stagnant. Too many competing product goals make big improvements nearly impossible. Local maxima was long ago acheived. Projects drag out too long, the pace of improvement is glacial. * The web product hasn't changed much since the acquisition in 2012, though the iphone and android app have improved a lot. * The product has some significant persistent bugs that make it feel somewhat unprofessional to use, bugs that are so expensive to fix that the engineering org is unwilling to invest in fixing them. * There's a certain amount of subtle background disdain for Microsoft among some Yammer employees. This is understandable to a degree, given MSFT's arcane bureaucracy. * The culture has experienced a slow motion death-by-a-thousand-cuts since the acquisition in 2012. It's still a great culture, still much better than most office environments, but the culture is slowly eroding. * Morale is very quietly pretty low -- lots of new hires are required to replace all the people who are leaving.