Toxic team environment despite generous pay and benefits - Software Engineer Engine Employee Review

They incentivized employees to write 5-star reviews here, and this was even mentioned in meetings. I really think your experience depends a lot on which team you end up on. A former coworker of mine joined a different team and said it was great and well organized, supportive, all that. That’s honestly why I applied. Unfortunately, I landed on a different team, and it was a completely different story. My manager didn’t really know how to manage people. That alone I could deal with, but the bigger issue was the lack of basic Agile practices. Stories were often not groomed or clearly defined, and a lot of the time there wasn’t even a proper description. (My former coworker said their team was nothing like this.) There were no real spikes and acceptance criteria were barely defined. So if something took longer than expected, the expectation was basically that you’d work nights and weekends to get it done. The PM also had a habit of using pretty unprofessional language. When we asked if we could groom stories before putting them into a sprint, we got blamed instead. Again, maybe just my team, but still. On top of that, new work would get added in the middle of the sprint without any discussion, and commitments were made to leadership without checking with the team. This is something a manager should push back on, but ours didn’t, he stayed quiet even when we raised concerns with the PM. A lot of the teammates was based overseas and regularly worked nights and weekends, which kind of set the tone. It felt like overtime was just expected. I saw people working late almost every day and most weekends. Overall, it felt pretty toxic. That said, I do think this might be team-specific, since I’ve heard much better experiences from others in the company.