Pros
I loved working with my project team (PMs, engineers, PMMs) and my design team (language, UX and research). I never knew what a supportive UX team looked like before getting the New Relic. No backstabbing, competitiveness, etc. my manager really cared about me and my personal growth. If I brought issues to him he would not treat me as if I were a problem. He would genuinely try to unblock me, give me tools to solve the problem, etc. I still remain close with many even after leaving the org and would work with them again if presented with the option. The base pay is excellent and very competitive. The SF and Portland offices are beautiful spaces.
Cons
I should’ve known there was an issue when I experience 3+ reorgs in my first year at the company. For an organization of this age, you would think there would be more maturity around how to best partner with research and design. It’s shamefully far behind industry standard practices in this area. It probably will not improve with the some of the current product leaders in place who treat UX, research and language team with disrespect. So much micromanagement happened that I no longer was empowered in my work. No room for validating designs and de-risking work with usability tests. Everything just goes live and we have to retroactively react to users not understanding the intent of layouts. My PMs never had control of their roadmaps. Sr. leaders two steps above us in the ladder dictated everything even down to the minute details like what button links were called. It was the most demotivating experience to see the work of so many of my skilled and professional teammates being ignored or only having 2% of insights from their studies being applied to the product. They burn people out and do NOT care. We are all completely disposable to them. People who get fed up with overbearing senior leadership are falsely painted as “not having resiliency” when the issue is that there is a limit to which any reasonable human being is capable of being constantly disrespected. If this is their definition of resilience then I’m glad I’m not their type of resilient. It’s not lost on me that I was at New Relic a year and some months and EVERYONE on my team that I started working with left. Most of the teammates leaving were women and people of color. Each of them described similar experiences as mine. It’s a shame because it was rare to find this perfect group of people who really cared about each other as a team. It made stomaching what we went through easier but it was not a healthy workplace.
