Friendly people, but slow and tedious for Engineers
Pros
Friendly people. Everyone I've worked with at CarMax has been very nice and pleasant to work with. No big egos to contest with. Flexible work options. Engineers can work in-office, hybrid, or remote. I've chosen to work 100% remote and management is totally okay with that.
Cons
Very bureaucratic processes. Expect to be blocked on getting many basic tasks done because you need your manager or someone from another part of the business to approve a request, and if they're out of the office for a week - you're stuck for a week. Teams work in silos. Product teams often work on their code in relative isolation, only reaching out to other teams when they need to call an API. Basic engineering problems get solved with different home-rolled solutions on every team, leading to tons of duplicated effort and inconsistencies between services. Top-down mandates. CarMax claims to promote a culture of "team autonomy", but has done so in the worst possible way (in my opinion). Your team will have complete autonomy to... figure out how to maintain an entire stack of cloud infrastructure to support every service you own - there is little automation or standardization to help you there. But if you want to add a field to your API request, or publish something to the messaging platform? Expect that you'll have to "run that by architecture", leading to several emails and meetings talking about "best practice" that can drag on for weeks. Certificates. CarMax's current model for managing cert authentication between services is a total nightmare. Expect several weeks each year where you're going to be emailing certs back and forth between teams, manually updating config files, re-deploying, and manually verifying changes. There is not much consistency between how each team handles their certs, so the more services you integrate with, the more complex this process becomes. Churn. At least 50% of the work I've done in the past year at CarMax is what I would consider "churn". That is, work that could have been eliminated under better technical guidance or foresight. Work that didn't exist in well-managed engineering departments that I've worked with in the past. That includes dealing with certificates (see above), building home-rolled "resiliency" solutions, compensating for unreliable APIs we have to integrate with, troubleshooting flimsy cloud infrastructure, responding to false-positive on-call incidents, and more. One-sided compromises. Leadership has been saying for years (long before I got here) that we "need to get off of legacy services". So we build new services, but we continue to make compromises in favor of the legacy services, usually because the legacy service teams are overworked and understaffed so they "can't make changes right now". This accrues tech debt and often leads to us implementing the same, broken processes with the same problems in our new services, like putting lipstick on a pig. Despite all of the above, I've been told time and time again that our product team is very high performing and is being touted as an example for other teams to follow throughout the org. This makes it difficult to propose changes or voice honest criticism, since the general consensus is that everything is great and we're moving "faster than ever". Compared internally, I guess my team is doing great. But compared to engineering outside of CarMax... I'm just left with the impression that the bar for success is very low here.
