Pros
- Amazing engineers who do incredible work - Elliot Noss is the real deal, and has fascinating insight into the domains industry - Cool products that have a strong impact on the world - Compensation is mediocre. I make $60k more now, doing the same job. - Benefits are quite good. - Engineering culture is excellent, and everyone in the org is helpful.
Cons
The product team is so far beyond bad it's hard to fathom, and when I left they were digging themselves deeper into the product-driven hole that is alienating engineering from management. The CTO is not strong enough to push back against the product department, especially since their old CPO has become CEO of a subsidiary company. In my 2+ years at Tucows, my single application had 5 or 6 product managers at the same time. Somehow, they thought that one application was 5 or 6 different products but only needed one dev team. What a nightmare. If the product managers were competent, it wouldn't have been so bad. Unfortunately, they completely failed to do anything other than complain that work wasn't done. Myself and my engineering team did all project management and work prioritization because the product team wasn't able to contribute at all. Product managers regularly demanded that certain work should be completed right away, but didn't understand that work depended on other work that they did not want done. The product managers desperately wanted to do engineering work, so they attempted to architect the application themselves and predictably failed to produce anything usable. The same product managers then complained to leadership about the architecture myself and my engineering team created because it didn't match their bad ideas. I should note that our architecture was validated, and what was what we built. Perhaps worst of all, when faced with pressure from sr leadership, the product managers orchestrated an unethical "demo" of a major happy path working, when in fact it didn't work at all and the demo was faked. My engineering team worked for two weeks to fake a demo instead of doing real work. Naturally, the main product manager was promoted and is now in charge of more products than ever before, while my project that he screwed up languished for well over a year after I left. I've heard it's working now. To succeed, Tucows needs to be an engineering-led organization again. At this point, the product team is too ingrained into the culture, so I don't see anything improving.
