If you're a Sr. level person this is not the place for you
Pros
I'll give credit where credit is due. There were some pros working here. - I got to work from home. With that being said I don't think I would have survived as long as I did if I had to go into the SF office every day. - I got paid enough to live a lifestyle that most people in this country can only hope for. I'd be remiss in complaining about my pay. - There are some decent people at the company, less now since people keep leaving. - An odd pro, but with the current exodus some of the worst employees have left as well. With that being said there's still plenty of bad employees left. - If you're a Jr. engineer you might learn something, if nothing else what not to do. - I liked the fact that we helped make a tangible object that people could buy. It wasn't just another app-fest like every other place in the valley.
Cons
Sadly, there are so many cons to this place I could write a novella so I'll try to keep it succinct. - If you're a senior level person you will not be happy here. They will whisper sweet nothings like "SOA", "AWS", "subject matter expert", "root cause fixes", "build from scratch", "you tell us what you need and we'll help you make it happen", etc. to get you in but you'll do almost none of it. Most Sr. people get put on the dumpster fire brigade to keep production to afloat. - The new shiny things are generally done by contractors not in this country. This place will not give you anything to help your career or put on your resume. - Along the same thread, the foreign contractors are treated better than actual employees. - As a Sr. level person, you'll be asked your opinion and for the most part be ignored. Or even worse they'll go with the opinion of someone who has no clue about running an infrastructure, how to architect and who quite frankly could be out coded by a 12 year old. At one point the Devops team had over 80 combined years of experience and the business would choose the plan of the aforementioned person over the group of people who've run infrastructures for billion dollar+ companies. - Communication in all aspects is abysmal. Inter-team communication is almost non-existent and management doesn't know how to talk to employees, let alone technical employees. Prime example, the way I found out about the future of my role wasn't in a 1:1 or an email, it was in an engineering all hands presentation. It's kind of like finding out you've been let go because you can't log into your company email anymore. Passive aggressive and ineffectual. - Management can't be trusted at their word. If you do decide to take a job here, get everything in writing so they can't back track on you and even then, they probably won't honor what they say. Prime example, I was told for 8 months (by C staff) that re-hiring a backup for my role was a company priority. In the aforementioned presentation and after 8 months of waiting I found out they have no plan to hire a backup and they took the posting off the web site. Basically, the only way for me not to be on-call, with peace of mind, was to quit. - Morale is non-existent here. The people who run this company have no clue that the poor morale issues are caused by them (at the top) and not their employees. Some employees work very hard to keep the company going and management continues to crap all over them. More about morale to come in the next section.
