Pros
The wider business and senior leadership are fantastic, nothing but great things to say about them. Senior leadership (VP/Director+) genuinely care and it shows. Technical teams getting part of the sales/commission bonus is nothing short of incredible, Working time was very flexible. Wider business was very friendly.
Cons
Inexperienced and emotionally immature middle management fostered a culture of 'Just get it done because that's what my leadership said, don't speak back to me'. They have no interest in making impactful change or improvements to the day-to-day life of engineers at the coal face. They only exist to parrot the KPIs from on high. Tasks turned into a metrics driven top-down approach, people would rather play it safe politically instead of question bad practices and short sighted decisions. During my tenure, I saw 0 promotions within my team, but had 4 different line managers. Too much onus on KPIs and metrics forces boots on the ground to spend time on box ticking exercises such as mandatory weekly training on basic HR principles and disincentives driving meaningful change. As one of only two senior engineers left in the team, I was on-call every other week from October to April despite weekly feedback that this wasn't sustainable and had a detrimental effect on my sleep and work/life balance.
