Clearly this will not be a flattering review and will be buried in the tide of astroturfed 5 star reviews gushing that everything is great.
CarGurus advertises itself as a tech company but it is a tech company in the same way WeWork is a tech company. It just so happens to have more people and a more recently developed website compared to its competitors and rides on the coat tails of Facebook and Google to resell advertising services to car dealers. Nothing it does is new or innovative and its "technology" is a monolithic mess that no one knows how it works and no one with the authority to spend the time to fix will want to do. You are tasked with fixing a near decade of technical debt but you have to do it the way your managers want else you are just harassed and bullied until you leave or they finally weaponize HR to just fire you.
You will see the salary, the benefits etc... and be lured in but keep in mind that it is unlikely to move up and you will have to move on in a few years to keep your career going. There is no career growth and the usual review processes are setup for everyone to fail so they have an excuse to not give you a pay raise.
Management is a mix of internal promotion of people who were there the longest and are drowning trying to do a job they have little experience in and no support or external hires who are the ones in the inadequate hiring process wore the best suit and made the white, middle aged, male managers at the top of the org chart feel the most comfortable. If your boss is the former then you and your team will flail around without direction and be blamed for not meeting unclear, unrealistic and unfair expectations. If your boss is the latter then you will either do what they say regardless of if it is the right thing to do or as previously stated be made to feel so uncomfortable you leave or your manager using HR to come up with some reason to get rid of you, mainly so they can hire in their friends from their previous company.
COVID-19 caused the offices to be closed and people to work remotely which is something senior management railed against constantly when asked and in communications since have been trying to get support for opening the offices as soon as possible so they can go back to having their staff under their thumb in the office once again. Of course the no one works from home rule is for some and not others as plenty of people had unwritten agreements with their bosses about being able to work remotely and quite frankly the resistance to not wanting to do so is just an attempt from poor management to control their staff because they don't trust they will work unless they can be surveyed from a corner office.
The CEO is absentee and just wants to run a forever startup and has lost interest going as far to moving all the new product work to a subsidiary and moving all the people he liked into it so they can play in the sandbox forever and ignore a directionless company whose stock is around a third of what it was at its peak. Langley if you are not interested in running CarGurus then sell your stake and go start something else. Clearly you are happier in that initial flurry of activity with a start up.
The rest of the executive board are yes men at best and negative contributors at worse with the board room being a game of musical chairs to who is going to get the blame for the latest mess.
This is getting long so I will just summarize:
Not a tech company, a marketing and advertising services company
The technology that does exist is a shambles
Senior management are absentee or underqualified
Middle management are every stereo type of petty to underqualified
HR is Catbert but with better PR people to write their nasty grams
You will never get a pay raise
Everything is your fault unless you are friends with senior management then no matter what mess you make it is never your fault
