Poor culture that values quantity instead of quality
Pros
- Solid team. Co-workers were all intelligent and talented people. - Compensation and benefits are great, especially for families. - Lyft credits, Orca Pass, transportation reimbursement. - Free coffee and tea.
Cons
The culture overall was abysmal. The particular org I worked under was attempting to build a tech product without any knowledge of how to properly build one. Even worse, management and executive leadership was not receptive to any sort of change in their behavior or expectations. From the get-go, the management made the decision to outsource a lot of their business needs to companies outside of the US. I personally have no qualms with hiring a third party to complete certain projects, but this org had developed a co-dependent relationship with an outsourcing company, which made any movement away from them impossible. This created poor quality work from a company that knew they had leverage. The lack of understanding of technical needs, especially within the front end development realm, was exacerbating. The leadership constantly barraged the development team with abusive undertones and basically told everyone how bad they were doing on a weekly basis. Requirements were constantly changing and contractors who were brought on to help the project were being taken advantage of daily. In addition, product/project managers had to give daily updates at 8am and 4pm everyday, including the weekend, to an executive team that felt that micromanaging would improve the pace of the project. It did not. The project I worked on had been in development for 2+ years already. In all fairness, there were managers that were brought on to help mitigate the delays. However, there were very poor hiring choices. The dev manager I worked for initially, was a complete narcissist who would offset any work he was responsible for on to his dev team. He would constantly pay lip service to inclusion and diversity, while alienating his most talented engineers of color because of petty disillusion and jealousy. He left the company after 8 months with multiple HR complaints. He was essentially paid to job search the last 2 months of his time in the org. The sheer disorganization and abusive culture made me leave a talented team of engineers. The leadership has squandered an opportunity that any other tech company in Seattle would kill for.
