- slow corporate turnaround speed is a killer. Simple problems became huge. It is impossible to be productive when you need to go through tons of useless software integrations or steps to solve simple 5 minute issues (for example when your computer is locked out);
- smart, but disorganized people, because top management and "leadership" doesn't know what they want. They often change plans half way in and there's no transparency between them and people on the lower level of hierarchy. You can experience the real corporate separation between managers and non-managers here and fear to raise concerns or ideas;
- too much bureaucracy and fake principles. I've been with the company for more than 7 years and saw how innovative, free, fun and friendly work environment became the salvage for corporate policies and modern local trends where people are judged not by the work they do and how they do it, but by other trendy social media qualities;
- engineers are not respected here;
- insane amount of meetings;
- majority of meetings are useless because people cannot agree on things or discussing things that should have been decided on day one. Other departments have a lot of meetings too;
- leadership (directors, top managers) do not meet to discuss the business/decisions with their subordinates unless they are managers too;
- managers are busy with meetings every day, where they try to decide "something", while keeping people who actually have the product/technical knowledge away from discussion. Reason is simple - self recognition and less resistance. It is easier to use engineers as coding only workforce, while satisfying the need of leadership for quick solutions. That's why senior engineers are leaving and inters are popular here. It is easier to control them because they lack experience in the field and deep product knowledge, it is cheaper and it is also good for company's social media reputation. No one cares about the product quality and customers. At the end, it is all about getting a bigger bonus and title for the managers and leadership;
- constant layoffs (so called "re-orgs"). This is the fancy way of firing people who have their own opinion and do not agree to sacrifice "security/architecture/product quality/customer satisfaction/UX" in favor of a quick solutions to squeeze more money from customers;
- disrespectful and defiant layoff/firing ("re-org") process. The way they let people go - oh boy... It is worst experience ever. It happened to my colleague. They treated him like a criminal, didn't allow to say goodbye, just threw a person to the street even though it was just a layoff. It is not standalone case, other people and teams were let go the exact same way. Some were let go after 10+ years of service and were treated as trash on the "re-org" day as well;
- huge cross-team communication problems. Each team consider themselves as standalone entity with their own goals, rules and "religion". There's no effective collaboration. You cannot come to a solution together and always have to fight and compromise to make investors happy. No lng-term vision from technical and product standpoint. Technical specifications are ignored, product specifications are outdated before they even finished. It is normal for managers to ask for tech specs without product specs;
- lots of positions moved to Canada and Europe. Meetings at 7-8am in the morning are considered normal in some teams;
- lots of managers of managers. Lots of useless director positions that only suck money from the company's budget, enforcing "re-orgs" every year;
- huge churn / turnover. 85% of people who built the company left since 2016;
- majority of PMs do not know what they are doing. Lots of projects are dead
born. Company investing millions of dollars and years of work while projects undergo the same path;
- 24/7 on call policy for every engineer, one week per month (varies by team). If you like to be woken up at 4am when the server is down (because infrastructure /devOps team didn't do their job) welcome to the company. Going to Tahoe for a weekend? You must take your laptop with you in case something breaks while you having a day off. It is easier for a company to hire two new directors of "something" than a team that handles night/weekends shifts as their main job (like it is suppose to be). They do not pay extra for it, they do not ask you for your permission. You just have to do it. Some engineers left because of that;
- not easy to switch a team. Easier to leave the company;
- technical leadership cannot come up with coding practices and development standards for years. Constant code base re-factoring and no technical vision making this "beast" hard to support or understand;
- if you are an engineer you are enforced to participate at hackathons;
- if you intern, please stay away. From technical standpoint you will not learn anything here. If you want to learn corporate politics - you are in the right place.
