A company that can't decide who they are - Senior Software Engineer Stack Overflow Employee Review

5 years ago Stack Overflow was hands down the best place in the industry to work as a software engineer. The culture, the collaboration and the feeling of trust inside Engineering made it the best place I have ever worked. From 2017 things went down hill, and fast. Inside Engineering things were still going mostly OK but outside Engineering there appeared to be a lack of unity and a lot of infighting. Then Engineering started being ignored by the rest of the company. Our opinions were labelled as not important and irrelevant, even though it was the small Engineering team who built the product that is almost globally loved and appreciated. New executives started coming on board, and I do not believe they were given the tools they needed to keep the company values healthy. I don't think they were ever made aware of the history of the company or that the Engineering team has very different values to what you would find at a typical company. Then things started to become more corporate. We stopped hiring international remotes. New decrees from HR were handed down without warning and without consultation with our managers. The open and trusting nature of all-hands meetings eroded. Questions for executives were now forced through a moderation queue where not all questions would make it out the other end. We were forced to sit down and write down our company values - something that 5 years ago would have not been necessary because we were all on the same page. I've never left a company meetup feeling worse about things than when I arrived. There are zero executives still around from when I joined the company, and maybe only two people from senior management. I've watched as friend after friend has left the company after relatively long tenures. Some teams have been decimated by engineering departures. If I'm going to work at a company that treats engineers and engineering like any other company does, then I may as well work at any other company.