Vantaggi
I really enjoyed working with my fellow engineers, they are smart and lovely people. It would be great to work with them again one day.
Svantaggi
Half of my immediate team (including my former manager) was put on PIPs (Performance Improvement Plans). As well as many engineers from other sibling teams (at least 3 that I know of), to the point where I have lost count there were so many. These are really smart engineers, ranging from greener mid-level engineers who graduated from their computer science bachelor's a couple of years ago to very experienced staff engineers with graduate degrees in computer science (and decades of experience at both large companies and small startups). Then almost all of my former team was laid off. I have never experienced such a mess of a Performance Review cycle, where not only were so many engineers put on PIPs, many other engineers were given harsh feedback and surprise bad/not-great reviews (at least an additional 2 that I know of). Many engineers already work long hours, including on the weekends. I am convinced that Management rained PIPs on engineers to push them to quit to avoid paying for severance. In the codebase, there is a lot of untested code...that is then super buggy. This goes back to just seeing engineers as code robots to churn out as much code as possible. Engineering Management praises engineers who work long hours. And then, for what? It never felt like there was a clear goal from Upper Management, but just to churn out tons of product offerings. It was also very difficult to work with my Product Director, where I felt like I had to bend-over-backwards to get a crumb of collaboration from them. It was challenging to get basic requirements for new features that Product wanted built. It was normal for surprise requirements to be thrown in last minute. And for more context: engineers cannot merge new-feature code without Product Approval. Engineers are also highly scrutinized how many merge requests are merged every week and every month. This leads to a losing game as an engineer. It was difficult to get my features even looked at by Product, where once I waited over a week to get something reviewed. I tried to ask another Product Manager to see if they had more bandwidth to look at my feature and they were forbidden to do so by the same Product Director (I have no idea why). That same Product Manager soon quit with no notice... I wish I were joking, but working here felt like a toxic episode of Silicon Valley. How is it that such a high number of engineers were put on PIPs? It can't be such that so many engineers were hired that can't code build software, right? Why was it such a struggle to work with Product?