CONS: - Founded in 2012, still have the mindset of a start-up despite growing fairly large (very few support teams like QA/testing, DevOps, support, etc.; instead, each developer has all those responsibilities) - No formal onboarding or training - Documentation is lacking - Deployment/release process is manual and prone to mistakes - Executives prioritize cutting costs over workflow improvements (actually downgraded some services) - Cybersecurity (see below) - On-call rotation (see below) CYBERSECURITY (con): - Executives over-prioritize ease-of-use over security - Executives over-prioritize quantity of code released over quality of code released (prefer to release relatively fast even if something breaks and requires a patch or rollback) - No standalone cybersecurity team or department, and no standardized security-related checklist or requirements for teams to follow - Embarrassing, inexcusable credential stuffing attack and data breach in November 2022 - Executives aren't too phased by security threats (DK is no stranger to lawsuits) ON-CALL ROTATION (con): - Team-dependent, but usually everyone on the rotation has weeklong shifts - If it's your week to be on-call, you have 24/7 responsibility to respond to and resolve pages in 10-15 minutes (otherwise it gets escalated, usually to your manager) - Your recruiter will probably tell you that it's no big deal and that you'll rarely get paged. Wrong. This is not a formality or anything; this is a significant 24/7 responsibility. - Again, depends on the team, but it's quite common to get paged outside of work hours, including the middle of the night (keep in mind that heavier traffic comes later in the evening and on the weekends in line with sports games) - On-call ramps up for the NFL, especially the start of the season as well as the end (the Super Bowl is the biggest day, so, even if it's not your shift, your Super Bowl party may get replaced with a team on-call "party") - For some NFL games (at least the first 4 weeks), if you're on-call, you're actually on a live call whenever there's a game on (Sundays as well as Thursday & Monday nights), including buffers before and after the game, monitoring dashboards the whole time - Some engineers are really passionate about the work and don't mind on-call too much, but if you are looking for a stronger work-life balance like me, I recommend looking for opportunities with fewer or no on-call responsibilities (if you're in development, look around; DK's on-call is not industry standard)
