There is no visibility regarding where the company is heading. You are just doing tasks assigned to you and fixing bugs. The upper management/HR knows about this and try to portray that they care, but the reality is people down below (at our level) still have very very limited visibility around things. It feels like the engineering team is just present to make sure that the product is up and running 24x7. We'll I guess that's the whole point of the engineering team, but I feel we should contribute to the company in ways other than producing code.
It feels very weird when you see the management take decisions without even being familiar with their own product or for that matter the competitors'. I clearly remember incidents where managers have said something that makes no sense at all. Senior people are way too cool to go through "onboarding". I am not generalising, there are only a few people like this.
No contribution back to the community. Open source contribution is not encouraged. Company feels like everything is their intellectual property. Discussing anything internal about the company to the outside world is discouraged, even if it is common knowledge in the tech industry. It feels very saddening because most of the product is based on open source projects.
“It’s your job” attitude. You solved a difficult problem ? Well, that’s your job. You were able to fix something at 4 in the morning ? Well, that’s your job. It does not really matter. Because of this people now are slowly loosing the dedication and the responsibility they once had for their product. I am not talking about “appreciation”. I am talking about “acknowledgement”. The task of acknowledging something might seem trivial and unnecessary, but it helps a lot.
And then the company worries about high attrition rate. I am not sure do they even worry about it or have come to terms with it. Every employee is now considered to be replaceable. You think you are important to the company ? You solved 100 different problems ? You stayed in office, came on weekends, fixed issues, shrug off a 10th of a second so that you can get a big deal for the company ? Well bye bye I guess, they will just let you go, you are nothing but a code munching machine. And honestly if someone reaches this state, they should leave.
The deadlines are tight. Producing low quality code on time is encouraged. If it is on time, then it is good enough.
The company is not yet big in the terms of employees but they want to act like one. “values”, “targets”, “culture” all seem too superficial to me. Or the way these things are implemented/imbibed, seem too unconvincing and unnecessary, rather a lot artificial and text-book like. It should be something that comes out naturally and every employee can empathise with it. It should not be force fed.
This has become more of an open letter to the company, so I should stop.
I like working here and will recommend it, it’s not bad, but not great either. I think I have grown into it. If you care about what you are actually doing and not expect anything back from it, you’ll be happy. If you think what you do for the company, the company will do back for you, then you are in for a disappointment.
