Your experience will be very dependent on your manager. Some are great, others are severely incompetent. If you're interviewing, don't be afraid to ask difficult questions, speak with prior employees, and meet people cross team. Data doesn't drive the company culture as much as it's spoken. There's conflict between C-level leadership, product & engineering management because they all have different agendas. It's really difficult for them to all be on the same page. Because of this, many projects, initiatives and work is half-baked, deprecated or changed after just a couple weeks in prod. ~1 yr ago product/management was doing a good job of protecting ICs from this, but that has since changed. Non-technical employees are notified of new features & changes to internal software via an email newsletter 1x/week. They are not provided ongoing training for these changes. Unless the feature you're working on is highly visible (accounting/finance, truck matching...), virtually nobody will hear about it outside of your team. This is a shame because UI/UX are rockstars, but a lot of their great ideas are shut down. There is higher priority on pushing the code rather than thoughtfully considering quality, and scalability. Although most standards are defined, majority of them are not followed by both Sr and non-Srs. This isn't because they don't want to, but because management puts a lot of pressure on just getting things out & deal with it later. The data team is chaotic. Models are often paused or rolled back because it seems they didn't test throughly, or consider enough edge cases. If you speak with the users, they will show you how some of the models are plain incorrect, or vary across different internal tools. They are incredibly smart, but a lot of them do not know basic Git, or basic software engineering practices. They seem to have fairly high turnover in relation to other teams. The workload is intense. With 8 points considered a full sprint, all Engineers on my team have been assigned 12-20 points for the past 6 months. This is common across other teams, as well. Feedback is frequently requested in surveys etc (both company wide & Eng-specific) but over the past year it seems to fall on deaf ears. Overall, it's really gone downhill in the past year. If you're passionate about stuff like best practices, "raising the bar", etc you would be disappointed and bored here. There is a lot of opportunity to get back to at least where things were, but that would take significant, collective effort from Engineering management.
