Vantaggi
We've got great 'fluff' perks -- a gameroom, well stocked snacks/drinks freely available, catered breakfast on Wednesday mornings, and a facilities staff who works hard to coordinate fun events around holidays and notable occurrences. We're allowed significant flexibility in working hours.
Svantaggi
Standard benefits packages and salary are not competitive in with other tech companies in the Puget Sound region. There are always a multitude of reasons why we can't promote internally, or can't raise wages of employees who've been with the company for a length of time to match those of new employees or match the standard for the region, but there is never any concrete way for employees to actually strive for improvements that would lead to career advancement. We have essentially no opportunity for promotion or professional development within the company. Managers always seem to prefer to hire someone from outside the company instead of looking at the resources they already have on hand. Some managers seem to actively resist internal promotions in favor of external hires. This is demoralizing to teams and individual contributors, and is actively destructive outside of team dynamics because of the tech debt that's always introduced by trying to solve our old problems of complexity by adding layers to them. Our review processes are arbitrary and seem to have no bearing on reality of employee performance or daily conversations with managers. Ratings are a surprise, feedback does not correlate well with the ratings, and ratings feel like they're set outside of the manager/subordinate relationship -- it's as if the ratings come from some quota set from above, and then the manager fills in the blanks on the review to match the magic number. Our senior Engineering and Product leadership seem more focused on their own short term agendas and political maneuvering than they are on trying to establish any common objectives for the company. This trickles down to the rest of their organizations -- Product is disassociated with reality, and much of our Engineering leadership seems more interested in resume building than in actually solving problems we face as a company. We lack any common vision or strategic goals. If they exist, they are not well communicated down the chain, and management doesn't work to keep teams focused on any common vision -- every manager has their own agenda, and will gladly play blame games and fight with each other if their agenda favors it. Very few leaders within the company care about team building or improving team dynamics; those who do are disincentiveized because there's always someone who's willing to cut corners or push problems on to other teams or individuals so that they can deliver something of any quality as quickly as possible -- and all anyone cares about is the short term. Leaders and individual contributors who show initiative to try and improve broken systems or tools are disincentiveized for the same reason -- trying to improve broken things or buck the status quo in any way whatsoever is bad for your career at DoubleDown, because the immediate deliverable of the next two weeks is all that matters to Managers. In Engineering we're Agile in Name Only -- as described above, Management will gleefully demand short term deliverables and minimum viable product ... but, since we lack any long term goal or unifying vision, ANY deliverable seems as valid as another, as long as you can do it quickly and push problems away from yourself.