Career Advancement: There are limited opportunities for professional growth and promotion within the organization. The company has an abundance of managers but not enough engineers. Due to stagnation in growth, even obtaining an IC promotion is likely to be difficult.
Work-Life Balance: It is not good right now. I understand having to spend extra time a few times throughout a year to ship something important. There were way too many instances of of overwork and I regret it to this day.
Lack of Direction: Product and feature direction decisions are not data-driven. Engineers are told it is their responsibility to manage tech debt and bring new features to life, but ultimately, they will work on whatever management or product owners provide. A lot of tickets are lacking product detail.
Not Engineering-Led: There are just over 200 engineers in a 2,000-person software company.
Tech Debt: There is a lot of bad code since this company was ran like a blind feature factory. They have their bouts of refactoring but usually only when it becomes really painful. You may get to fix something that increases productivity about once a year. Other times only if it is absolutely required to push a feature and fits within a small time budget.
