Pros
- Regular review cycle and opportunities for promotion - Annual performance bonus (capped at 10%, now tied more heavily to company's financial performance instead of individual performance) - Catered lunch once a week (down from twice a week last year) - $20 weekly DoorDash credit for in-office employees - Quarterly new-hire happy hours - Occasional company events like hockey and baseball games
Cons
- Unnecessarily complicated Bazel build system results in long build times (trivial code changes can often take over an hour) - Poor testing setup leading to lots of CI/CD pipeline timeouts requiring full restarts - Poor code ownership policies result in slow pull request reviews - Prioritize the usage of in-house libraries over industry standards - New hire salaries are down over 20% across engineering job titles within the past year - Constant churn of IT, HR and development platforms - There was a security incident last year where a malicious party gained root level access to production AWS accounts and began deleting services and customer data. All contractors were fired as a result, supposedly out of an abundance of caution, but no post-mortem was ever given to the engineering department. - Unequally applied RTO mandate. More than half of the engineering team is fully remote but those living within 50 miles of Philadelphia or NYC will be expected to be in office 2 days a week, likely going to 3 or even 5 with the news of the Amazon RTO mandate. This is an especially odd decision from management as the office wifi is constantly going out, sometimes for hours at a time, and there is currently no requirement on which days of the week you must be in office to achieve the goal of "collaboration" - Management has an obsession with copying their main competitor, Hivestack, instead of trying to innovate.
