Feature factory - Senior Software Engineer Interviewing.io Employee Review

Everything engineering-related is in horrible state. Code base is a bowl of spaghetti, deployments are manual, front-end is built on a framework that nobody uses anymore, engineers are playing whack-a-mole with issues that come up all the time, not much is being done to prevent issues from coming up in the future. PRs are rubber-stamped, the attitude is "if it's reversible (e.g. not going to lead to data loss), anything goes". During the most of company's existence engineering team was very small (~3 people) so had to take a lot of shortcuts and incur a lot of tech debt in order to ship features quickly. In 2021 the company raised series A, which is when a lot of companies clean up their messes and make sure development can be done sustainably going forward. At that same time Interviewing.io was profitable which meant it had all the time in the world to do it. Instead, CEO decided to hire several high-level executives (which cut down the runway by a lot) and continued pushing for more features, more growth, all while complaining about the fact that shipping features is now taking longer than it used to (I wonder why!). Priorities shift all the time. Tens of hours are spent coming up with quarterly goals and metrics only to scrap them and switch to something different a month into the quarter. CEO kept saying we will clean up the mess that piled up over the 6 years preceding series A but engineers were never given time to do so. CEO kept saying that we will hire more engineers (we had 3 engineers on the team and 5 open positions) but never succeeded in doing so. After working at the company for a bit less than a year, I was fired for trying to fix the mess that is Interviewing.io's engineering systems. In summary, if you're an engineer and you care about your craft and learning good engineering practices, steer clear.