Pros
The work/life balance for me is very, very good. I am rarely questioned on how I spend my time but I am also a straight cis white male, so take that how you will. I am paid adequately for my work, although I could probably be paid better if I switched jobs. My work is generally enriching and has a big impact. I am given pretty much free reign to solve my problems but I do not work on the main 'product'. I wouldn't touch product work with a ten foot pole, it is a nightmare. Leadership here are at least not raving jerks. That's a low bar to clear but it is something, I guess.
Cons
Leadership here is absolutely awful. Truly horrific. There is zero strategy. We are now all-in on 'AI', whatever that means, because the people in charge have literally *no idea* what this company is about or what we should do. I cannot stress enough how bereft of ideas this leadership group is. And it's an objective truth! This is not an opinion! I can provide a concrete example! We constantly switch major priorities. We had a whole year planned out for 2024 and then a few months ago suddenly we had to drop everything to get a pricing update out the door within a month. Almost the entire engineering org was impacted by this switch. If you are making these kinds of major swings in 'strategy' then it objectively shows that you have no idea what you are doing. You are just reacting to things that happen around you. The current leadership team has cultivated a group of middle managers that are fine being beaten up and overworked. In some cases people stay because they have no integrity or ambition. In other cases they are in difficult life situations that make a job switch hard. Either way what we are left with is a bunch of managers and directors that are stuck in a "it is what it is" mode. They will just dump out whatever is asked of them so they won't get in trouble. Any managers that push back against this ultimately burn out and leave. Any good work here is despite leadership, not because of it. Some of the infrastructure work is truly top notch and that is because it originated from senior developers, not from leadership. I truly cannot think of a major initiative that has started from leadership and actually accomplished its goals in a timely fashion. Not a single one in the last few years. We literally have had multiple major projects in the last 2 years that took months of work, multiple full time engineers, and then just...didn't deliver because of issues that the teams are apparently incapable of solving. In response to this nothing is done and more projects are green-lit. We have two major projects that are currently mired in this situation: they are 'done' but cannot go live because it turns out the design was not fully thought out and now the teams are stuck, facing major redesigns as a path forward. I think most product devs are truly good at their jobs and decent people but leadership has morale absolutely in the dumps. Everyone is afraid of more layoffs. We 'implemented' kafka for no real reason and use it basically like AWS SQS. It's constantly down because no one owns it, causing outages. This is a concrete example of a leadership failure, one of many. Working here is basically about being constantly told 'no, that is impossible, stop asking', doing it anyways and succeeding, and then everyone acting like it was all part of the plan all along. Don't come work here in engineering.
