Pros
- No accountability for performance, it's extremely easy to coast and just barely meet status quo, conversely it's hard to get raise or promotion unless your management chain drives hard to make it happen (unfortunately there are a lot of incompetent engineering managers at CF) - Unlimited PTO goes well with zero accountability culture
Cons
First thing I need to highlight is the engineering culture is highly toxic, during my time at CF, I've encountered the following: - High confrontation (getting yelled at publicly in meetings, getting massive downvotes and negative emojis in chat threads when folks don't agree with you, lack of respect for people as humans) - Gaslighting (after raising concerns about a teammate's behavior towards me in meetings and code reviews, manager literally just responded with "don't take it personally, they're just trying to attack the problem" - classic tiptoeing response to avoid addressing respect and empathy) - No concept of "disagreeing and committing", a lot of engineers at CF are smart, but are jerks. There's a lot of folks who are credible in terms of their individual talent, but certainly are not likeable. When a decision has been made, instead of respecting and committing to the decision, I've seen and was horrified by the unprofessionalism directed towards the decision makers. Another big problem that I've experienced that continues to be an issue at CF is lack of valuing employees: - Low compensation (I made it a big concern that I was not fairly compensated, especially when CF's stock plummeted, I made a case that I could literally go anywhere else and have my TC doubled, I was told off both by my management chain and by HR, so guess what? I interviewed and found a new role that doubled my TC.) - Deceit (a huge red flag when I initially joined was that the recruiter I was working with flat out lied about how he didn't know what my level will be when I joined, he also mumbled something along the lines of "we don't do levels at CF" - this was downright false, and I was brought in a P3, when the level that matched my experience was supposed to be P4) Unless you're particularly excited about CF's mission, I would avoid at all costs. Even if I didn't receive another offer, I would have needed to leave soon since my mental health was deteriorating based on what I experienced above.
