Slack reviews

This review pertains only to the Data Engineering team within Slack. I am a former member of the DE team who recently quit. I highly advise any prospective candidates to rethink if they want to apply here. The engineering culture and technical caliber here is appalling. Weekly, sometimes daily, outages are the norm. Dev and prod don't match at all, and testing on production data is routine and encouraged by management. On-call is dreaded for the poor engineering soul each week. And firefighting isn't limited to the on-call engineer either, as multiple team members are almost always pulled into incidents. Postmortem meetings are held at a regular cadence (usually at least two per week). The only reason Slack's customers don't experience any of this is because when DE outages happen, they only affect the other internal teams. Almost every aspect of engineers' tools work against them, but management doesn't seem to care. The code base is likewise a mess to behold. An experienced engineer knows that poor tools and poor code means that mistakes are very easy to make, which leads to further problems that compound. As an engineer here, you will be blamed for decreased productivity by leadership, despite the tools and infrastructure being the things that slow you down. On the topic of leadership, DE leadership is visionless and doesn't prioritize permanent fixes or true debt cleanup, but instead encourages technical mediocrity and cowboy coding by rewarding short-term "wins" over long-term stability. Promotions also follow this rule. (Hey, immediate results can be attributed to single people; long-term fallout is distributed across the team and is "blameless.") Several other engineers have quit over the past few months, and I'm sure more will in the future. Join Slack Data Engineering if you want to experience how a mosaic of engineering anti-patterns looks like in practice. P.S. Check out some of the other reviews for Slack DE on Glassdoor, and you'll see a similar sentiment repeated by others.