Join for the people and leave with friends but that's it - Anonymous employee Sauce Labs Employee Review

-i am learning a lot about testing automation but if you ask your fellow coworkers who work in product and engineering how to run an automated test, the majority of them will say they've never been able to figure out how run one which is a bit concerning since this is their product -product is very disconnected org spread across a 9 hour time difference, i applaud the product managers as they tried to be self managed and collaborative without any leadership - there's not a lot of leadership to communicate and structure the overall vision and business objectives. If i ask what are the priorities for the company, what manager A says is going to be different from what manager B says - that leads me to this topic, middle management in product is not good, and this is the truth, sorry not sorry. they are all men who happened to gain from favoritism by being in the boys club with the CPO. they are not people with extensive managerial training or people with well-rounded product experience that i would look up to or would consider as mentors, they are basically sales people with a product manager title -it's a very defensive B2B product strategy where everything is based on ARR $ and what gets prioritized is based on who is the loudest from Sales or the highest paid person in the room - they have a very active acquisition strategy by buying up other companies but they have not learned from their past mistakes that they have very poor communication, project oversight, and project execution skills for integrating products into Sauce Labs. Good luck with migrating the 3 new companies in the next century lol - since defensive B2B product management and acquiring companies are their main strategies, the Sauce Labs platform has declined rapidly since basic design improvements and user experience ideas are always considered "non-ARR prioritizes" which you can tell from an instant glance and from the first experience of using Sauce Labs - there is zero recognition for people who work hard and show results, the performance review system is not based on an objective feedback collection process but just your manager's personal opinion and if they woke up on the wrong side of the bed the day they wrote it, then you are effed. So many good people have left because they are just under-recognized for all their hard work and not compensated the same while others are favored and given raises without hesitation because they won the career lottery of being a man and male privilege goes very far here at Sauce Labs because it's synonymous with "merit" - berlin and warsaw are treated like the offshore help who comes to pick up all the broken glass after someone's Greek wedding. for a company who emphasizes quality, there are no quality engineers or quality process or change management process or written release notes. There are a lot of bad practices for releases and due to the disconnect in product and engineering and time zone differences, there are teams releasing without letting other teams know in advance and then it ends up being an incident, a bug, or some after hungover aftermath that the European team needs to deal with -the work-life balance working for an SF headquarter company is awful if you're in Europe, this company's unique selling point when they hire should be that they are scheduling 1000s of hours of zoom meetings, all hands, company summits and most of them go into the evening for Europe. their counterargument is "take a longer lunch break"...well I can't if you scheduled a meeting during my lunch breaks as well