No team structure or leadership layer. There are no PMs, and VPs expect new hires to self-direct on everything. Success is undefined — "impact" means spamming PRs and flashy demos at the bi-weekly show-and-tells. The performance culture is superficial and sycophantic by design.
No engineering quality gate. A single monolith is shared across a dozen teams with no senior engineers gatekeeping. CI/CD builds take forever, PRs pile up for weeks, and code quality is degrading fast because everyone is incentivised to ship, not to ship well.
DevOps is a structural bottleneck. You have two options: persuade the (overloaded) DevOps team to help you spin up a new service, or wrestle the monorepo and wait weeks on PRs. Both take forever. DevOps themselves need weeks to ship a trivial service — the resentment toward them is real, but it's a systems problem, not a people problem. Nobody gets credit for filling the gaps, so the shortest-path hack becomes the only viable solution.
Burnout is the baseline, not the exception. Everyone is visibly exhausted and running on autopilot.
Hiring without a plan. Heidi burns money on talent but has no team-building structure, no onboarding support, and no documentation. When you raise this, the answer is "just ask Notion AI to summarise Slack." Long-tenured employees are either comfortable with the dysfunction or lack the taste to see how hostile it is for anyone trying to build something new.
Nothing is built to last. Ship it and forget it. This is literally in the core values, which creates an unresolvable paradox: how do you do something fast and with quality and depth at the same time? The org has picked a side, and it isn't quality.
Boys' club dynamics. A favoured few run the show without demonstrating strong engineering fundamentals. Once you have upper management's trust, rules don't apply to you. Planning carefully, thinking defensively, or behaving like a responsible engineer will actively hurt your standing.
"Hire fast, fire fast." Direct quote from leadership. Believe them.
This is not a mature company. It's a small-team mindset scaled up past its breaking point, and the cracks are everywhere.