Lack of engineering culture stifles growth and accountability - Staff Software Engineer ActiveCampaign Employee Review

* leadership is slowly recovering from the past 5+ years of poor decisions as we move to our new CPO/CTO...we are still suffering from past mistakes in a large way * engineering has no real structure at the high levels, we are expected to just kinda figure it out ourselves * AI is a huge push, if you are frustrated with AI grandstanding in general then you will be frustrated here * No professional development money for engineering...we cannot go to conferences or get training, it's explicitly banned by upper management for inexplicable reasons * there is no real accountability in our technical organization. You can miss alerts/pages even while on-call as primary and no one really bats an eye. Just say "I am away from my computer" and no one really cares or follows up and we don't do retros or investigations into incidents * we make big bets without any real backing data, and then act surprised when it doesn't work out * we have zero engineering structure around decisions or frameworks...we just let teams do whatever they want and then act surprised/defeated when those teams perform poorly or are blocked by their decisions because 'no one else can help them'. There's no accountability for poor decisions on language/framework * there is a ingrained sense of "I have no power" that is embedded at nearly every level of the organization. Teams frequently just say "I'm blocked" without even attempting to figure out their issue. We tolerate a lot of waste * engineering is largely white males, despite the DEI pushes we make The main issue is that there is zero engineering culture here. The previous CTO completely abdicated his responsibilities on that front. He was an 'ideas' guy, which basically meant 'I manage up, I do not care what my direct reports are doing'. He didn't care how his directors or managers behaved and in the end that ruined him. Multiple failed projects that were the direct result of his lack of oversight are what drove him out. The basic idea here is that AC does not care about basic engineering culture. If you say "I cannot figure it out" no one pressures you or says "you must figure it out". You can just kinda stop working on things and everyone in management says "Oh, that must be hard, let's pivot". The people that are capable of actually troubleshooting have mostly been pushed out. The remaining like-minded folks try to keep things going in the right direction but honestly there is no real reason to do so. You don't get better performance reviews, you can't get promoted, it's mostly a waste of time. We clearly do not hire anymore in the US for engineering, we are basically entirely offshore in Costa Rica and Poland. Management needs to fix the engineering culture, and fast, or things will continue to stagnate. I will end by saying that 'staff engineer' is basically the highest engineering position you can get here. There are ostensibly higher positions like 'principal' or 'distinguished engineer' but it is unclear what you need to do to get promoted to those. They are not defined anywhere. The real-world answer is "Make the CTO like you and he will promote you". There's really no other option. Don't join if you are at staff level and want to progress, there is no way forward. Join this engineering org if you are a mid-level dev that wants to get to staff level and then leave. There's no growth beyond that.