Pros
- comp and benefits excellent - good budget for WFH equipment - fun offsites - people are generally intelligent and easy to work with - work/life balance good
Cons
[This is specifically for the Talent engineering team] I received an offer after only a single round of real interviews, which was a red flag, but the offer and company reputation were strong so I didn't think too much of it. Many interesting potential projects and possibilities for contribution were sold to me during the process, so I initially had a positive outlook. However, once I onboarded and started working, things quickly went south. It was clear that my team manager had not identified any real projects for me to work on, and my only immediate teammate had moved to a timezone across the world, making any sort of collaboration extremely difficult. For the first month or so, I was forced to pass the time trying to find work to do and completing small tasks here and there. An extremely anxiety-inducing situation for any new employee. After some time a clear project for me to work on was finally identified, and then the true chaotic nature of this company came to light. Their management concept was "running each team like its own startup within a startup", which in reality resulted in extremely siloed teams with completely misaligned incentives. I felt more in competition with other teams than we were working together towards a common goal. My project involved working with another engineering team to improve their systems, but it was nearly impossible to get a resource from that team who actually understood the legacy system. After much back and forth I was finally asked to work with another employee who was himself new and understood the system about as well as I did. The whole situation was ugly, with the team I was supposed to be helping attempting to wash their hands entirely of the faulty system that was fully their responsibility. Predictably, the project was a failure upon launch, and it appears management decided to pin the blame on me. I returned after a winter vacation to a surprise termination with 0 notice, feedback, or opportunity for performance improvement. The saddest part is I was quite relieved at the end of all this, and had already lined up a much better situation for myself. Good riddance. Aside from all this, my immediate teammate appeared to see me more as a competitor than a collaborator, and shunned any attempts to work together. They rather preferred showing off their productivity and spent most of their time building features with no material use cases to show off their engineering prowess. Definitely spoke to the larger trend of mindless performative productivity at this company. Completely toxic culture as of early 2022, I hope it has changed for the better by now, but I'm not at all optimistic given my experience.
