Pros
I don't have anything to say here
Cons
- Roles and levels are essentially meaningless here. You can be working alongside someone as a peer on one project and reporting to them on the next, with no clear ownership or responsibility structure. This creates a lot of confusion and makes accountability nearly impossible. - Project management is poor. Timelines are unrealistic, priorities shift constantly, and there's no real process for how work gets scoped or delivered. - Work-life balance is non-existent. Calls get scheduled at 8PM with little to no notice. Weekend and holiday interruptions are treated as normal. - There's an implicit expectation that you're always available, and no one in leadership seems to question it. - As an engineer, the expectation is that you can be dropped into a completely unfamiliar stack and deliver as an "expert" after a one-hour call with someone. The reality is that technical leadership often lacks depth and relies heavily on tools like ChatGPT to review work, then deflects blame downward when things go wrong. - There's also a tendency to simply agree with whatever the client says, even when there's a strong technical rationale to push back. It leads to rushing through solutions the wrong way just to keep clients happy in the short term. - Partners and Directors are better at selling buzzwords than understanding whether the proposed solutions are actually feasible.