Benefits:
- Benefits are significantly below bar for most companies nowadays. PTO is accrued into one bucket for sick leave, holidays, and personal time. No federal holidays off. Time off requests are meticulously tracked. PTO requests are arbitrarily and inconsistently denied if not requested two-weeks in advance.
- Anecdotally, the health plan didn't cover much. I emptied my entire HSA on therapy sessions (100% in-network) until I couldn't afford it anymore, and medication I needed wasn't covered so I had to forgo it.
- Pay isn't transparent and is not competitive in the tech space right now. There's no annual bonuses. And lack of clear career growth can mean an already low total compensation doesn't grow for years. Company explicitly does not do annual cost-of-living adjustments, so there's absolutely no guarantee of year-over-year growth financially.
- In-person perks of the office have never effectively transferred over to remote equivalents. Lunch credits became few and far between, half-day Fridays were (quite literally) laughed off from senior leadership when asked if they would extend beyond Summer 2021. There was a monthly internet stipend ($45/mo.), but even something as simple as replacing some broken headphones was denied.
- No extremely serious commitment to embracing remote-first work. Implicitly pushing people toward getting back in the Portland office ASAP even as COVID continues to be a thing. Leadership and management continuously throwing money toward trying to get everyone in Hawaii, Florida, Arizona for full-company events.
Management:
- Many managers are severely undertrained or have a significant lack of professional experience leading others. Most have spent either their entire career or a significant portion of their recent career at OpenSesame and refuse to accept that there may be other/better ways to work. There's seemingly no oversight or consistency between managers, which can lead to drastically different team dynamics and individual experiences.
- Significant amount of "boys club" happening among leadership, management and a few individual contributors. Referrals, outwardly, seem to be more successful when there's some historical tie to someone higher up.
- There was a noticeable lack of empathy from higher-ups, combined with a lack of trust that the individual contributors are competent engineers capable of completing work. A very heavy culture of "if I don't see work happening, then it's not happening".
Technical:
- The technical work day-to-day is tedious. There's a lack of clear technical vision in improving the platform behind this company. Most projects are explicitly opportunity-driven based on monetary deals, and they are rushed across the finish line without a clear and concerted effort put into sustainability and stability. Very few projects are ever revisited. I don't recall any project ever being informed by customer- or usage-analytics -- it seemed as if projects were always top-down on an arbitrary basis.
- There's no mature level of internationalization, accessibility, and localization built-in to most features. Everything is viewed through a US-English-speaking-lens first.
- No senior contributor(s) have stepped into a championing role to ensure that the health of the entire platform is improving or moving in the right direction. There's no overarching patterns or systems in place to ensure that quick and secure development is possible. Most larger, critical changes were taking two+ weeks to release and frequently resulted in regressions and production issues.
- Working day-to-day is frequently interrupted due to a fragile and error-prone setup that can waste days and tank your personal productivity.
- Almost non-existent level of meaningful documentation in the older, more complex parts of the code. You'll often find accompanying PRs with no descriptions or linked stories in order to gain any context. This makes rework or fixing bugs anxiety inducing and near impossible to do with a high level of confidence.
