Engineering is a career dead-end - Software Engineer Handshake Employee Review

1.0
Dec 19, 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Full commitment to remote work, pay is competitive

Cons

The reviews don't lie, there has been a massive negative shift in the company's culture throughout 2023, starting with the performance based layoffs at the beginning of the year. Internal company surveys also reflect the sentiment; employee confidence and pride in the company has tanked. No action has been taken by leadership to change this. The engineering organization has been in disarray ever since the surprise Fall 2022 re-org, and re-orgs are now regularly happening every six months. Like your team or what you're working on? Don't get too attached, soon enough you'll be on a new team in a new product area that nobody is familiar with with no training. Teams are disbanded with no thought put into the maintaining the domain knowledge of the team members, and documentation is nonexistent. Collaboration is starting to break down, no doubt due to the company's "performance culture" and focus on individual impact above all else. Tribalism is becoming common, where other teams will try to put a stop to any work that crosses into their domain, regardless of project priorities. Worst of all are the performance reviews. First of all it takes months to even receive your reviews, by the time you do you're already a third of the way into the next cycle. Then there are the reviews themselves, and despite the supposed culture, performance is not rewarded. The most minor of missteps will be used against you to knock down your review score - even if they were due to factors outside of your control. It's also a common theme that negative feedback is not regularly shared by managers, so negative reviews come as a complete surprise.

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Handshake Response
2y
Thank you for taking the time to share your experience. We recognize that there have been substantial changes across the organization – and R&D in particular – over the past year or so. As of December 2023, we have new leadership in place over both Product and Engineering, and we are confident in these leaders and their vision for the organization. We anticipate that with these individuals at the helm, many of your concerns will be addressed. We welcome feedback about internal processes, including our performance review system, and we run a retro after each cycle to assess how we can improve the process – we’ll bring your feedback into that conversation as we want the performance review process to be impactful and timely.

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5.0
Jun 12, 2026
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Pros

Work at your own pace.

Cons

Task limit when new to project.

2.0
Jun 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
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Pros

It's flexible and sometimes the money is OK. I got paid most of what they owed me.

Cons

Generally disorganized. The task I was on was one of the more highly paid ones but it was almost impossible to actually do in the allotted time. You aren't supposed to use AI but I think people must. The tasks run far over the time they are supposed to take. The human review system also seemed almost arbitrary. Reviewers did not have the subject matter expertise they claimed to. You will make less than the advertised hourly rate because the tasks routinely take longer than they say they will. If they have averages that are lower, those people are either not submitting accurate hours (there is incentive not to) or are using AI to train AI, which is a bigger problem (but not yours).

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