Disappearing Comp - Senior Software Engineer Snap Employee Review

1.0
19 Oct 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lottery ticket, may not be your favorite job but it could be your last job! You may create the seed of an idea that will take root in many other companies, even your competitors!

Cons

This place is craaaazy, crazy political (even to me, and I used to work in city government!). It's because incentives are all crazily misaligned in a myriad of ways. The New York office is particularly egregious. Managers are also writing code, so it's my way or the highway no discussion. You can do either one of these roles well, or you can do both poorly. Two same named guys can't figure it out. Senior management is quite inexperienced, so political bad actors rule the roost. Teams are siloed from each over, very hard. The tech is poor, and immature. All we know how to do is use some open-source software or pay some service vendor. Its not interesting being done wrong. The politics keeps it from getting fixed. There is no career progression, and I personally know several cases where people are not being treated correctly. As you can imagine the personal growth and well-being of an individual will be the least of your directors, or managers manager, or mangers problems. That ALL takes a back seat to navigating the crazy waters of Snap Inc. You are in this for the money, only. So is everyone around you. Nobody has ever been able to explain a business plan to me. I have watched us innovate, release product, be ripped off. We rinse, we repeat. I don't get it. Maybe you will have better luck understanding our business model if you join. There was some weird unspoken war between the SFO office and the rest of the company. They won, then lost, and now it's NYC and SEA mixing it up with LA. Different comp and review in each location. Likewise between the GOOG and AMZN folks who lost, then won. The bars are way uneven. Like way uneven. (callback to that incentives are all misaligned, #callback) (Also, note to the reader - the HR department at snap has written a lot of glowing & misleading reviews. Be sure you speak to a real engineer before interviewing and get their take so that you know what's real and what's not. This is what is really like, were you expecting a more technical job?)

Explore other reviews about Snap

5.0
2 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great working culture and mission of work

Cons

I don’t have any cons

2.0
17 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Great base comp - Unlimited PTO - Good food at offices

Cons

- Leadership is incompetent. This company will die and when it does, it will be no one's fault other than Evan. - If you disagree with leadership and speak up, you will be punished. All SMC VPs hired each other from past companies. They are all corporate ladder climbers from Meta with no morals. - Being a leader at Snap means leading through fear and regularly throwing tantrums in conference rooms. - The ads business is a joke. No matter how many ex-[insert big tech name] engineers work on the product, you can't monetize an audience of 13 year olds or people who's sole use case for this app is inappropriate. - There is truly nothing redeeming about this business, B2C or B2B. It's all smoke and mirrors. I've never seen the population of monetizable users grow, it's only gone down since I've joined. To offset this we acquire the cheapest users possible to appease investors who see straight through this BS.

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