The image recruitment portrays, and the candidate they filter for is completely out of step with engineering. BIOPIC recruits are brought in the door but an agressive culture, where doing anything but taking "The Glory" for oneself in an attempt to be a hero at the expense of company stability is punished sevearly. If you have a difficult family life, family members that may have medical emergencies a lack of a functioning support system, or a deseased/working/ non existant spouse, you can take off family leave, and have ample vacation time, even take paternity leave, to welcome new children. But just remember that those 2 weeks will result in "missed expectations" from the inevitable reduced output on your next bi-annual review. With that review you can kiss any chance of promotion goodbye for a minimum of 1 year. If you happened to have that happen at the beginning of a review cycle it is going to be at least another 18 months. They have no mechanism to equalize ratings of individuals to account for vacation/paternity or sick leave. If a road bump hits. You are best off hoarding side projects, new advancements and innovations to release them at the end of next review cycle, Because there is no making up work and meeting expectations, in a brutal foot race where they "feed the winners, and starve the loosers" . An unstable family life, a depth of character beyond the company all make you an unreliable looser. Long gone are the days of taking time off for cancer, still contributing, and being held in awe. You will get canned, or derailed from promotion reguardless of effort. ---+ As for mentorship that left with John Timpson. All quietly mentoring a junior does is steal your thunder, and leave you with one less thing to tout when it comes to reviews. You have made them appear as a rockstar at your own expense. If you present a new design, people will smile say it is wonderful, and than savage it behind closed doors at the end of your time investment, never bringing concerns the first half dozen times you talk to them. The higher the paygrade the longer they will wait to give feedback because those who rise up know that making it look like you wasted yor time is the easiest way to drop the bottom of the curve, and highlight themselves. ---+ Product stability has suffered greatly since Timpson left. He was at least able to keep people focused on long term gains. and slap down some of those who sabataged others behind closed doors. Now teams are focused on only their own presentations, and individuals on their own benefit. As long as blame can be shifted it will be. Case in point when we had a rolling Multiday outage, the VP yelled at those oncall for not having metrics to see why we were failing (hint it was a team that had failed to scale up). The response to this was a rage email ro all teams who had already shifted blame to "not me", that they needed to prove it wasnt them, in the middle of the night. After that they were forced, to impliment stronger metrics and waste valuable feature time. to show something had been done. And as a result, the next week the same sorts of teams that couldn't identify that their own system were overloaded continued to do so, and were only the saved from causing sevear customer pain by other teams who had sharpened their own fans so they could quickly point them out. There was no discussion about how: * Incentivising only deliverables in a quarter contribute to a lack of ops awareness. * The obcession with cutting costs, forcing teams to saturate their systems at capacity. * Or a hecktic push via checkbox based security to contstantly update libraries, without incentivising, ops or maintainence work by the teams implimenting them lead to this. The only metric security cares about is out of date libraries. The only metric fleet cares about is the hosting costs. And all the teams being pushed by the declarations from on high the teams only get glory for "new features". That enable yet another contact. No one is really interested in the others sucess because it cant be sold. All the "hard problems" and "stability oriented" problems are foisted on those too naive to duck out of the way, or are so disengaged they are already looking for their way out . ------+ Attempts at increasing moral: Their attempts to increase moral has focused soley on better food , and more booze during happy hour/farwell parties Hard liquer is now served, and one can smell it in on peoples breath, while walking across the office during regular buisness hours. These attempts seems primarily geared twords those who have no life outside of the company, and are satisfied to drown away their sorrows in the breasts of the company.
