- culture has deteriorated heavily in last year
- awful/incompetent senior management
- many poor promotions and mis-hires in recent times
- perks have been scaled back heavily (used to be free lunch for the entire last week of the month, free snacks from nature box, monthly company-paid happy hours etc.)
- work/life balance is very erratic; some teams have 40 hour weeks others will regularly put in 50-60+ and there's no recognition or compensation for it
- diva personalities
- marketing-driven development
- developers are code-monkeys with little to no input in products
When I joined, this was probably the best company to work for in the DC area; yearly dev trips (all expenses paid) to Vegas and then Bahamas. A cornucopia of free lunches and happy hours, free snacks from NatureBox, reasonable hours and fun work with smart people. Developers also had a good deal of input and say in the product and the process before.
This year our dev trip is Philadelphia : / I could drive there on the weekend but I don't because it's Philadelphia and I don't want to be there.
All the perks that used to exist are slowly being scaled back and eliminated. Morale is at an all-time low.
Recently, things have been taking a turn for the worse. Senior management and C-levels have been pushing a poorly executed shift to agile and a new 'pillar' structure and it has been a colossal failure. What was once a scrappy, lean team has turned into a nightmarish bureaucracy of middle-management where busybodies create hoops for people to jump through to deter any actual work getting done.
All of this has also led to a toxic influx of office politics. Several diva personalities exist and senior management has their favorites. Cross one of them even accidentally and you can be sure that your name will get dragged through the mud behind your back while they smile and joke to your face.
Overall stress is at an all-time high but compensation is low with wide disparities between engineers. If you do end up joining, make sure you negotiate before you join because your salary isn't going to jump much and they will lowball you if they can get away with it.
A good 25% of the dev team has left due to poor compensation just this year.
