Confluent reviews

Innovation doesn't go further than striving to fall short of Amazon without company operations blowing up. Earlier, I mentioned there are learning opportunities if you're interested in distributed systems, but those chances are limited by brain-dead operations work. Politics - Get on the wrong side of certain people, and you're pretty much cooked. Say goodbye to promotion prospects and hope your LeetCode skills haven't gotten too rusty. Mid-level management is comprised of brain-dead spreadsheet fillers who are paid a quarter million dollars. If AI is advancing to replace developers, let's replace them one time. Be prepared to handle almost any problem, even if you have never interacted with a particular part of the system or the product, in highly stressful situations. How many times are you willing to sacrifice your weekend for at best a "kudos" email from your co-worker, but in most cases, it's to make sure you're not fired for "lack of ownership". The benefits, in comparison to other companies, are lackluster. Constant shift in priorities The team you work on determines whether you work 20-hour weeks or 80-hour weeks. Stock is in flux, and now fewer people are invested in the product than before.

This place changes you - and not for the better. I changed. My bosses (yes, multiple bosses in short periods of time). My colleagues changed. Even my friends who work(ed) there changed. The culture is so toxic that you either must join in or be excluded. I started to feel mean. I had to leave before I started to hate who I was becoming. I wasn't alone in this phenomenon. I saw it happen to people around me. I had former employees say the same things to me. I have watched warm, friendly, caring people turn into cold, back-stabbing people. It took several months after leaving to really understand the impact a toxic culture can have on a person. The company only rewards people who self-promote - even if they have done nothing, have taken credit for others' work, lied about work or people, or completely changed the goals of their reports and then set them up to fail in order to "rescue" the team. Harrassment is tolerated. Once it "goes too far" the leader is moved to another team to manage a different group rather than legally dealt with. The company has no strategy, organization, or operations. Hitting Wall Street numbers includes cutting meetings or software or not backfilling important roles. The work is either left undone or piled onto under qualified employees left to hope they don't get bullied too much. Even after leaving I continue to hear from colleagues who get laid off or leave because of the failing culture. The product is falling behind the competition and is no longer the winning racehorse.