Lack of engineering leadership hinders growth and consistency - Senior Software Engineer Zip Co Employee Review

if you are reading this, keep in mind that this review is based solely on the ANZ Engineering side of Zip. There is no technical leadership. Staff engineers, directors etc. are not capable to have opinions and set guidelines. Every team is left to define their own principles, etc. Which lead to massive inconsistencies between how services work and handle things like naming, failures, timeouts, etc. The architecture guild will "vote" on guidelines sure, but no one is enforcing them. You will hear stuff like "Zip is at the forefront of technology" or "Zip is getting itself ready to become a next gen financial blablabla" during all hands meetings. But seriously? Who believes it? It's always the same thing... create a new Rest API and a new Kafka topic. Rinse and repeat. There is no ownership / decision making left to the team. Everything is top to bottom and in reaction to events. Relationship with a SaaS provider is starting to degrade? Drop everything planned. You have to find and integrate a new one yesterday. So "leadership" can threaten them to drop the contract. Want to take on some ownership and make a little quality of life improvements or some house keeping? You must have a director or CIO approval regardless of your level of/ position. There is no positive challenging. You will be dealing with issues weekly. And most of them are due to the lack of long term view, knowledge & opinions of the people in "leadership". Growth is not a thing. You will hit a ceiling very quickly and then to go above it, it is all aout networking / friendship and "who has been there the longest". Merit / knowledge growth is almost non-existent.