Pros
Co-workers are genuinely smart and kind people. The product presents interesting challenges and the company has continued to grow fast. Benefits and pay are top tier.
Cons
Leadership has completely lost touch with reality, particularly when it comes to AI and what it can realistically achieve within sane timelines. There’s a constant push to “do more with AI” without any grounding in actual engineering effort, tradeoffs, or limitations. Deadlines are set arbitrarily and treated as if we’re delivering life-or-death systems, when in reality slipping a few weeks would have little to no real-world impact.
Burnout is widespread across engineering. If you ask any IC how they’re doing, the answer is almost always the same: exhausted and overwhelmed. Instead of addressing this, management deflects responsibility and blames engineers for “not managing their time better,” which is both dismissive and inaccurate given the workload and expectations.
There’s also a severe lack of trust. Product direction is bottlenecked by the CEO and VP-level leadership, who insist on approving nearly every feature. This creates unnecessary delays, undermines product managers and engineers, and signals a fundamental lack of confidence in the people hired to do the job.
On top of that, a significant portion of the engineering team has been outsourced in the past couple of years. This has introduced major consistency and quality issues, along with a noticeable decline in ownership and long-term investment in the product.