As a preface to this, I survived the mass firing in January and the mass layoffs following COVID. The cons I've detailed below are key factors to my decision to move on.
1. Engineering Approach: Theoretically there could be some really interesting learning opportunities here - between the big data attribution pipeline and the discovery work and exposure to data science and machine learning. However, what you end up learning are things NOT to do, which is not particularly helpful to career growth and development. This problem is due to the lack of business analysis and risk assessments, resulting in poor planning, engineers not understanding the customer impact of their work, and a lack of technical design/engineering practices. The emphasis is consistently on time to deliver to the detriment of all else. This leaves engineers scrambling to get something done on time without a clear understanding of what is actually needed. Additionally the work is doled out in a silo - specific tasks assigned to specific engineers, so there is very limited knowledge sharing and generally no team-level understanding of the systems. Lastly this leads to on-going system stability issues (see other reviewers' comments about customer-facing availability problems) and a terrible tech debt backlog. During my tenure I didn't learn any good practices or techniques - just things to avoid.
2. Politics: As some other reviewers have stated, there are definitely undercurrents of favoritism and nepotism at Branch. It's demoralizing to see people who've only had a handful of years of experience at ONLY Branch being promoted into Staff Engineer roles, while so many other more qualified and more experienced engineers were passed over. Also the "shout-outs" the CEO highlights are mainly for people working long hours either to resolve an outage or to get something done by a time deadline. This makes it clear that working long hours to save the company from poor planning is what's valued the most. A side-effect of this is that good engineers are left wondering about how they are valued. If it's clear the company can't do planning, and doesn't recognize the importance of good engineering skills, then how can anyone feel comfortable believing they are or could ever be fairly evaluated? Bottom line - it's about who you're making happy and how many hours you are willing to put in to repeatedly save Branch from the overpromises of the CEO.
3. Diversity: The majority of the leaders of diversity trainings and initiatives and ERG leads were let go in the layoffs. It was a clear signal that diversity at Branch is not valued.
4. Trust: The CEO utterly mishandled the firings in January and the "covid" layoffs in the spring. Multiple people were let go in January without warning and were "fired" even though they had no PIP, no indicators, and had actually had good reviews. Then the layoffs happened after only 3 weeks earlier we were assured that the company was fine and that worst-case planning had been done. Because of that communication, it left me wondering if we were intentionally misled or if the CEO is not competent enough to actually do worst-case planning. In either case, I lost all trust in anything the leadership said after that point because I couldn't count on it to be true. Many people felt very unsure of their job security after this, which made the work environment way more stressful and I assume is a significant factor to the subsequent attrition.
