Pros
Downtown Oakland location is nice. Money is okay.
Cons
Dictionary was a great place to work - academic, technology focused, with good work-life balance. It took less than a year after being acquired by ROCK (AKA Quicken Loans, AKA Rocket Mortgage, AKA Dan Gilbert) for the last dregs of our culture to finish circling the toilet bowl. In all that time, no one from Detroit ever once expressed *why* they wanted to buy a dictionary, other than an off-handed brag from Dan saying he now owned the English language. Company direction is primarily accomplished by means of yelling; someone from Detroit yells at the CEO, the CEO yells at directors, the directors yell at PMs, and the PMs yell at engineers. This is not hyperbole; there were literal shouting matches in the open office. Detroit is used to getting results via screaming, threats, and juvenile chest-thumping; this might work in a financial boiler-room, but is just sad in a supposedly diverse, progressive Oakland tech company. Politics, grudges, and squabbles over territory are daily occurrences. Features are slammed through to "show progress" and "demonstrate a sense of urgency" whether or not they are thought out, useful, or in many cases even functional. Raises and bonuses are withheld as "motivation". Managers make plans to impress their higher-ups with zero basis in reality; in one case, the engineers were presented with a lengthy spreadsheet of new features, expected revenue gains from their implementation per quarter, and what actual gains had been realized from them to date, which was negative. Vague threats were issued if things didn't improve. Problem was, the engineering team had not even heard of a full third of these new features which we were already considered to be behind on, and many of the remaining ones had not been spec'd out or prepared for implementation in any way. New leadership has no clue how to run an engineering organization, and any attempt to inject reality into their preconceived notions immediately marks you as "the enemy". This dragging wouldn't be complete without a special mention of "the ISMs". On your first day, new hires are handed a luxuriously printed paperback book with 19 corporate principles. This is separate from the employee handbook - it's a distillation of "wisdom" that is held in nigh-religious esteem by the owners. Within your first month, you’re flown to scenic Detroit and forced to watch a day-long, ridiculously over-produced stage show complete with mock game shows, crowd participation events and D-list celebrities, all focused on the ISMs. I am not kidding. Most of these are standard fare ("Do the right thing?" Thank goodness they wrote that one down, I might have forgotten.) Some are outright lies, such as “Numbers and money follow, they do not lead” - the fear of revenue loss was drilled into every employee at every possible decision point, and useful features were repeatedly shot down if there was even a possibility of short-term monetary impact. Other ISMs are Doublespeak re-definitions of common expressions - a favorite is probably "We eat our own dogfood," which in Detroit-speak means that you will be expected to purchase as many ROCK financial products as you can, and recommend them to your friends and family, and that you will be aggressively marketed to at every turn (Never had your home address sold to advertisers by your employer? Get ready!) There will be lovingly filmed examples of executives demonstrating astonishing levels of tone-deafness and pettiness. Employees that demolish their personal lives to work extra hours will be lauded. You will be taken on a walking tour of Downtown Detroit, shown all the buildings that Dan owns, and be expected to be very impressed. It's a firehose of truly sickening corporate Kool-aid. The best part is, your annual review will be based in large part on how well you’re “living the ISMs”, which is utterly unquantifiable but provides an easy way to turn the screws on employees for completely arbitrary reasons. Benefits are worse after the buyout, generally below Bay Area standards, but be ready to be told they are the best of the best, along with the HR department (useless), hiring (beyond useless), the IT support (comedically awful), and procurement and legal (glacial). The cognitive dissonance employees are expected to swallow is staggering. In summation, run very, very far away.