Compensation sucks. Met a guy working there for 8 years and his total comp is 115k. Bonus is around 5k, or 10k if you're really good, and the best developer still left there made 20k bonus after working literally 12 hours a day and being on call for every production issue. All the good people are looking to leave. I'm paid at 110k total compensation (100k salary and 10k bonus). But this is variable since bonus is variable. And I have a master's degree + 5 years work experience. They barely even give raises, and if they do, it's a very small bump that in some years won't even match inflation. There's also this toxic banker mentality that you need to "earn" all raises, even though we literally just an inflationary bump so that we're not effectively making less money.
The better you are, the worse your work life balance becomes. In the team I'm at, they will expect you to be on call during weekends for prod support. Fixing a bug in prod is the worst thing I've ever seen in a company. The Solution itself is technically simple. But you're not authorized to deploy the solution yourself. So you're stuck in like an 8 hour call just trying to get other people to run your fix, as they try to fight against you. Eventually they finally do, but my god, the amount of red tape you need to go through just to fix a production bug so a customer transaction can go through in insane and idiotic. Management is aware, and they do nothing other than say that you'll be on more of those calls, almost like a punishment for even bringing it up. And you're still expected to get all your normal work day of work done when these daily production bugs happen. So work life balance suffers the more involved you get with the company. They will try to have you work weekends. And for what? The compensation is trash.
They also are forcing everyone to return to the office. Including developers. This is stupidity, 100%
