Pros
- One of the better front-end codebases around. 100% unit test coverage with RTL and standards are high. This is all thanks to the setup done by the previous Director of Frontend Engineering. - Squad structure made sense in that we had the necessary people (PM/TPM/DEV/DESIGN/QA) - Promoting Managers in house
Cons
- Leadership above Director is completely detached from the rest of the team. - Engineering at the leadership level is an afterthought and the department is "cut-first hire-last" basis. For years we sat through 3 hours of recognition year-end meetings only to have the VP of engineering recognized for their work out of the entire company, whereas multiple members of other departments were recognized. They were all flown to Hawaii. - CEO mentioned it was a flat structure and he can be approached on an All-hands. I approached on slack after he said that and literally lost my promotion after a C-suite interrogation session. More specifically, the "officer to the CEO" asked why I didn't fall in line and went straight for the CEO, my response was "the CEO said we could in front of everyone". At my next meeting with my manager I was told "your promotion is put on hold as some members of the C-suite have reservations about your ability to do your job". - CONT'D ^: Just want to note, I was leading a squad that was consistently ranked the most productive squad in the entire engineering department. So the sudden change in tone came out of nowhere. - C suite death-marched the entire PTG department for a quarter to try to go public. Dubbed "Project Fierce". The project essentially caused multiple teams to work 60+ hours a week for the majority of the quarter. Then afterwards questioned why we could not maintain "Fierce" velocity. They eventually created another "Project" quarter dubbed "Project Everest" to force PTG to do the same. - Axed an entire office in China without sufficient knowledge transfer and hires to replace them, then wondered why velocity and stability dropped. - Shortly after the layoff of most of our BE Engineers in China, they axed the entire QA department to move to India. To rub salt in the wound they gave the Lead no notice. Leadership wondered why velocity dropped to a standstill afterwards and morale dropped to an all-time low. - Decided to include one of the most technical and senior members of the engineering staff to be part of a layoff. In that span of layoffs, they lost the majority of the domain experts. At the same time, their entire engine run on a proprietary query language. Word: TBH I do believe in Ted. The couple of times I chatted with him he did seem to care. However the captain steers the ship, and unfortunately, he's doing a pretty damn bad job. data.ai (formerly known as AA) lost its product leader status since the data issues and gutted its entire engineering team which means it can only be in maintenance mode moving forward. The lack of innovation on a not-very-sticky product where competitors can consistently undercut you means it is now a shell of its former self. For the foot soldiers and lower/mid-managers in engineering, it's a shame because they have put a lot of effort into maintaining a very high code standard that I haven't really seen in many other places. Too bad the product itself is a POS.
