Good engineers deserve better than this - Software Engineer Alchemer Employee Review

Career growth is effectively nonexistent. After five years and multiple major technical initiatives, a promotion proposal I put together went nowhere. No criteria, no timeline, no honest conversation. Just silence. Don’t mistake ownership of hard work for a path forward; those are two separate things here. The deeper dysfunction is the culture of performative product development. Product and Sales routinely drive engineering efforts aimed at checking boxes for Gartner analyst mentions or propping up renewal pitches, not serving actual customers. Features get scoped, resourced, built, and shipped. Then the moment the sales cycle closes, they’re abandoned. No follow-up, no iteration, no investment. The work exists to say “we have it,” not to actually build something useful. After a few years you realize a meaningful chunk of your output is slide deck ammunition, not product development. That’s demoralizing for engineers who take their craft seriously. The company also appears to be pivoting away from its domestic engineering talent, significantly in favor of offshore resources. The people who built the platform are being treated as a cost line to cut.