Affirm reviews

My gosh where to start… * too much process. I spend 70% of my time making documents, 25% of my time in meetings and 5% of my time actually coding. * engineering team boundaries are not well defined. Figuring out how to do a project is a mess and makes sure you’re always in a ton of meetings with other teams. Due to this there’s a fat mess of bugs and everyone hot potatoes them to other teams. Even the tests don’t catch these bugs and if you’re on an “experience” team you’re the first line of defense for having to drop everything when you’re on call to figure it out. Then you need to pawn it off on a downstream team. Awful. * obsessing over the smallest thing. I made an email thread with my boss and a PM about when to turn on a feature flag for launch and the next morning it had 7 other people added on the email and 8 questions for me to answer. The work ballooned beyond a simple answer. It does all the time. It isn’t fun. * expect to really REALLY be on call - cancel your plans for the whole week. The infrastructure is so brittle and interconnected that the on call rotations are busy and you really get grilled if you don’t know which other of the 6 teams you work with could have produced a bug that is breaking your API. I’ve broken down more times than I’ll ever admit. You’re gonna get paged and it will hardcore suck. * upgrades require a huge amount of team co-ordination. Imagine 6 other teams coding in the same repo and you all need to upgrade to the next major version of the visual component library. Incredible mess. * still on Python 2. * you need a huge doc explaining why you want to make a change instead of just making that change and shipping it. The time to make the smallest change has grown exponentially in my year here. * staff software engineers run every meeting for the team. You’ll never have time to work on actual coding. If you just want to scope large projects with reasonable boundaries, easily work to make a stable product and ship your high quality coding work then do not go work here. A staff software engineer is essentially just a PM. This is a nice job for some but hugely untenable for me.