There are too many things to list here so I will focus on the major problems.
Management has made some pretty questionable decisions with regard to the engineering department, the most significant of which is the decision to fire all of their engineering managers and make their tech-leads "Tech lead managers". Never heard of that title? Neither has anyone else. The tech leads don't have management experience, They don't know how to do it, or what it should be. On top of that they need to continue being tech leads doing system design, writing technical plans, and doing a lot of coding. So they're basically trying to fill two separate and distinct positions which is a recipe for failure. This resulted in an environment where my direct manager was hyper critical, offered little to no support, and was generally very disorganized. What else would you expect from someone who doesn't know what a manager should do? Why did they fire all of their managers? Because it saved them money, you really don't have to look any further for an answer. Who takes the blame for the engineering department having issues meeting deadlines and functioning smoothly? Not the person who fired all the managers, it's the engineers fault, of course.
This next one is probably fairly unique to me, but I was hired for my 3d experience and was promised that the company was interested and committed to creating 3d pipelines and investing in them. But that never happened and I was severely misutilized, working on their homebuilding platform mostly on the backend which was frustrating and demoralizing.
Speaking of their platform it is a huge mess. It's overcomplicated, overengineered, monolithic, lacks explicitness and is generally very unreadable. Instead of elaborating on that I will get into why this is the case. The culture there is terrible. There are a few 'Tech lead managers' there that make all of the decisions with no room at all for disparate opinions or plans. I was told many times that I should be offering more input and feedback on things but whenever I did, I was either ignored, or I ended up in an argument that always resulted in 'we're going with my plan'. Doing that over and over again meant I just stopped trying to give any kind of feedback. This means that 2 or 3 people are deciding all of the system design and code style things without any input from anyone else. As a result there are quirks like using a custom ORM built and maintained by one of the most-senior engineers that no company should be using. The ORM works but the patterns established make for a codebase where you can't easily read what is happening in the code because there are side effects happening in some random file several folders over with no direct connection. How are you supposed to know where to look for what is happening, or more importantly, what should be happening? I still don't know.
I found the expectations set for me difficult to impossible to meet. There were times when I wrote code that worked, was performant, had tests, was bug free, was actually readable, etc. and was asked to refactor the entire thing, taking twice as long, because it wasn't quite the way my manager would have written it. Then when it came time for performance reviews I was docked points because I was taking too long on some tickets.
This one applies to a lot of companies, but the company's goals are disingenuous. They like to say they want to make buying a home easier and better for everyone, but they only build luxury homes for rich people. Not exactly surprising, but I make pretty decent money and I could never even consider buying one of their homes which really makes the whole thing feel bad.
There were very few people I could get along with, or even converse with like they, and I, were a person. This isn't a hard requirement for a good job but it really made me feel like I didn't belong and it was a slog to collaborate with anyone.
There are quite a few more negatives here but I've said enough. Suffice it to say that if you're considering a position here you should really think twice. I never felt valued or heard, it felt like I was never considered a peer. Any ideas I had to improve some of the problems there were dismissed or ignored. And in the end it became so stressful that I couldn't continue to work there and maintain my mental health.
