Read This Carefully If You Are Thinking of Joining
Pros
I have worked with some genuinely amazing people here who have truly had a positive impact on my early career, and I will always carry on the lessons they taught me.
Cons
I can't say enough bad things. But I'll sure try: This is a workplace characterized by lethargy and rapidly sinking morale as the stock price plummets. The most valuable talent is resigning in droves, leaving behind dwindling numbers of less experienced and very worried employees. Management offers very little else but offer lip service to comfort them, but I am certain they can see the writing on the wall. Extremely toxic culture full of petty political conflicts and fragmented higher ranking management attempting to quietly undermine and one-up each other. The hierarchy is rampant with do-nothing managers, bullies, and brown-nosers. Lots of two-faced people whose attitudes can change so rapidly, it is almost unsettling. There is also a lot of favoritism and nepotism. I predict this company will stagnate and wither slowly due primarily to its failure to attract and retain young talent. In the larger team I worked in, there was a great level of apathy towards the onboarding of new hires, creating a new "generation" of underperforming employees (often to no fault of their own; it is a truly sad thing to watch happen to young and capable engineers). Current leadership has neither the patience nor the interest in advancing the careers of their young talent and as a result newbies are mostly relegated to doing the grunt work of their superiors. These new people are not given any concrete trajectory or actionable steps for growth or any sort of properly structured training, yet expectations increase as their tenure goes on. In the years I worked there, I observed this lack of investment repelling young talent at an extraordinary rate (None of many the people I joined the company with in my age group were left by the time I departed), leaving behind an ornery refuge of aging and inflexible leadership. This will prove disastrous in the long term as the older leadership begins to retire with no properly trained replacements left to keep the ship afloat, all while critical talent is being lost rapidly to attrition. Overall, this has become an extremely outdated organization that feels unenergetic and unattractive to young talent. One mantra can encapsulate the general attitudes of this organization: "Everybody wants results, but nobody wants to train". Compensation and benefits are not competitive, especially for those in SD. As SD becomes increasingly expensive to live in, this company is falling way behind in terms of compensation. Totally inflexible and antiquated attitudes towards remote work. Current CEO is outspoken in his support for office presence, spouting generic platitudes about "collaboration/face-to-face interaction/learning, blah blah", and mandating 4 days a week in office. However, the office fails to provide a meaningful experience for those who show up and its common areas are often abandoned, with most choosing to hide in their offices and interact fully online anyway (might as well stay home then!). If the CEO wholeheartedly believes the forced return to office is benefitting productivity he is DELUDED and truly has no awareness of the ground-floor experience. Otherwise, he is lying and just following the industry trend of forcing people back to office because other companies do it. I don't know which is worse. Few unpleasant experiences with ill-tempered, unstable, and verbally-abusive leadership figure in my early days. Thankfully, they were few. Very bad first impression though. Constantly changing requirements on projects due to unsure and poorly thought-out designs, leading to weekend/late night work. Projects become plagued with band-aid solutions as technical debt mounts exponentially. Leads often lower their standards of quality to increase turnaround time with the intent of appeasing pushy bully management, which leads to extreme instability and overtime work to fix the problems this creates down the line. These leads care more about the appearance of rapid delivery than the quality of their deliverables; they just want to check as many boxes as possible as quickly as possible so they look good in the daily meetings. Poor work-life balance Terrible diversity. Extremely homogenous. If you do not belong to the majority ethnicities present within the company, you will be made to feel like an outsider. Reactionary company! Will chase the latest market trends with no regard to the primary competencies of its employees or even the longevity of said trends. Shows a lack of confidence in their ability to innovate in their dominant area; this company is not behaving like a leader, now it is a desperate follower! This leads to more overworking as employees must frantically update their skills so they can deliver on new fast-paced projects. Employees are often conscripted to these projects whether they want to, or not, and are given very short windows to deliver, which is horrendous for morale.
