- Everything (marketing, engineering, HR, etc) is done with a product-first mentality, meaning that a lot of the supporting infrastructure on both the technology, time scheduling, and human resources are assembled with a rickshaw, good-enough mentality, so a lot of issues arise from it.
- Due to the aforementioned mentality, there has been massive technical and operational debt accrued in almost every code base and management won't prioritize removal of it unless the global ticketing system auto-cuts a deprecation request; this results in future technical work being far more difficult than is necessary because management refused to invest the time and resources to it as best as possible the first time.
- The recent change in the company's official principles stripped away core values like "Insist on higher standards" and "show backbone." While the removal of these principles are actually reflective of how Audible has operated before then, that kind of culture leads to a very hierarchical structure regarding decisions made by upper management to its detriment.
- If you change managers, chances are your career progression will be delayed significantly by that, and in some cases you will restart from scratch.
- Audible over-focuses on account acquisition, leaving user experience as a second though most of the time, which makes it difficult to get emotionally invested in the work as it feels like we're just trying to do an aggressive cash grab all the time rather than giving our customers the best experience.
