All comments are my opinion.
Do you enjoy having to cc your manager and their manager on every email you send? How about weekly micromanaging sessions which you'll spend many hours preparing for (but always get crapped on during)? Watching your team of ~5 all quit in the last year or two? Management which is commonly referred to as "slave drivers?"
All this while being paid 40% under market value!? Bay Area compensation is truly awful. Don't think being new to relocate there will help - I knew someone from a rotation program who was let go within 9 months due to reorg. He shared a room with 2 other people. Seriously, compensation is low.
What I learned is that there is a "culture of fear." All decisions are top down and all you are supposed to say is yes. This place will kill your soul and make you woefully unprepared for anywhere you actually have to be creative or think for yourself. Seems even after more than a year in a new company that some still couldn't shake all the bad habits and it hampered their ability to perform optimally (such as speaking up or coming up with ideas in a more open culture).
Management varies a lot in quality, had some great (all left within a year, smart), and some truly evil managers. Even after a whole team left over a couple of years and managers kept dropping like flies, nobody asked a single question of why that might be (terrible management).
I do think the company is aware and the awful management is purposeful to some degree. Cheaper to get employees to quit than lay them off. Better to grind through people or only have the people who don't know work life boundaries stay around. Or so the thinking goes.
Tech is awful, large parts of work should be automated and systematized. Management should be happy to hear large parts of the job could be done away with. Does not work like a tech company under the hood.
I learned the irony of Silicon Valley being named after dinosaurs like this while real tech companies push boundaries with their products, business model, operations, compensation, and culture.
No CRM. Seriously, everything is tribal knowledge, email chains, and spreadsheets meticulously updated for many hours each week. Lots of early and late calls with Europe and Asia while still needing to be butt in seat during normal hours. Innovation = cheaper, long gone are the days of exciting new tech.
Thanks for the depression, anxiety, and low pay, but I'll go elsewhere.
