First off, most of the reviews here, over 90% are people who sell the product, not people who work for the company, so beware of that.
Management is awful. Middle management is basically anyone above senior engineers, like principal engineers, VPs, and directors, who just do a lot of pushing work down to the teams and do very little coding themselves. The direction we get from above is without any compassion or understanding of the team's workload or of them as people at all. We had an 'employee appreciation week' last month, and not a single person told me or anyone that I've spoken to, "Thank you for everything you do," other than a few generic emails and no other recognition for remote employees. It's never like, Congratulations on finishing a project, we appreciate it, here is something a little less complicated since you've been working 50+ hours a week for months to help balance that out, and we want you to take off early this Friday before a holiday to help recharge. It's more like, here is a new huge project, or a dozen small projects, when you are only 75% done with the last one, but you've been working 50+ hours a week, so you should be used to it. I've never worked somewhere that every person, especially managers, is so willing to just talk over other employees, especially those with lower titles than them, and no one ever just calls them out, or they never get any kind of feedback from higher leadership to not talk over people. I am also astounded at how some of my female colleagues are completely written off, even when they have good comments, questions, or answers, just get spoken over, ignored, or directly dismissed by some of our male (and female) leadership. I'd like to say it's because of the overwhelming workload and poor support, but after seeing it stay the same way for so long, even get worse with new C-suite people, I see now it is just ingrained in the culture. Raises are tiny, and if you don't negotiate a great starting pay rate, you will have trouble moving up unless you get a promotion (raises have nothing to do with how good your work is or how much you do, it's 99% based on promotions, and you might get 1-3% a year if you stand above your teammates). Another problem here is that Engineering should really be managed in a different way than, say, a phone call center, which is what most of the company is structured as. The work an engineer does can be loosely related to a customer service phone operator or someone who responds to emails for customers, but in reality, they are vastly different, and you should know that they need to be managed differently. I think that's a huge reason why compensation is so uncompetitive, and there are really no 'perks' to working here, just very basic benefits that are at best midrange. Lastly, it's like an unspoken rule that everyone here celebrates all the Christian holidays. We got a ton of "Happy Easter" emails last week, and even at the Holiday Celebration in December (which, for remote employees, is only a Zoom meeting and they do nothing else for remote workers), they played all these strongly Christian songs. A lot of people make these political or socially inappropriate jokes or comments, even c-suite people at all hands meetings. It's not particularly welcoming to people who don't celebrate religious holidays, or have the same political ideology as the C-Suite people, and reminds me of a few years ago when we had a prayer to god before all-hands meetings.
