Pros
Opportunity to work with mountains of data Migration to AWS will give you valuable experience Smart, caring, hard-working co-workers Some really good training Remnants of past efforts to support people and instill good culture still available, if your manager cares to use them Name is well known in the industry so it will give your resume a boost.
Cons
New Relic is not the same company it was a year ago. The culture has changed from a very well-respected company for software developers to a micro-managed feature factory. One might say this needed to happen for the company to get on a firm financial footing where it was growing at the same rate as its competitors, but the business results have not materialized and the cost has been massive. Furthermore, some of the managers doing the micro-managing have no clue how the product works or what their teams do, leading to bad decisions and wasted effort. The mismanagement of this culture change has led to a lot of attrition which has placed further stress on the remaining staff trying to meet the demands of the C-suite and the market. The former and current CEO have no qualms about making very micro-level product decisions, disempowering product managers. Direction changes are frequent, and there are multiple “top priorities”. There are constant reorganizations at all levels. I’ve never seen so much attrition at the C-level, SVP, and EVP levels. Many leave in less than a year. Even at the engineering level, you may have 3-5 different managers in a year. Engineers are on call 24x7 every N weeks where N is the size of their team. Some teams have as few as 4 members. Your colleagues will step in for you to give you a break, but it is a heavy burden. Even if you are not being paged all night, you are also providing expert support to customers, so once every N weeks, you are consumed with pager incidents and investigating customer problems versus developing software. Compensation is another issue. New Relic used to have a unique compensation structure in their product development organization which meant that everyone at the same level was paid the same. This has been replaced with an opaque system that resulted in 0% salary increases for some employees and no RSU refresh for some engineers. A bonus program has been added with 3-5% bonuses which is the smallest percentage I’ve seen in a bonus program. If you want to know what New Relic is like now, sort reviews by Most Recent because it is a FAR different company now than it used to be. Also, if you want to know what it is like in product development, look for reviews by engineers.
