Pros
There was a community of talented, caring individuals (ICs and middle management) who supported each other and were passionate about shipping quality features for Quizlet's users.
Cons
- There has been no strategy for years. If there ever is one, it veers mid-quarter. Work assignments veer accordingly. Then leadership blames anyone but themselves when productivity tanks.
- The CEO and his army of VPs brought "Amazon/Google accountability" to engineering, and want to drive out what they see as a bunch of low performers. They demonstrate zero ability to distinguish between "low performer" and "mvp". So they drove out most of the mvps. That's in consumer experience engineering btw. There is a smoking crater where the Data & AI org used to be.
- The CPO did nothing for years except kill the ideas of his product managers. No ideas, no direction, no support.
- Leadership has massive fomo about alleged AI productivity. They measure it with poorly correlated metrics like commits, PRs, lines of code written etc. They keep deciding they haven't replaced enough "low performers" with AI. They’re desperate to drive two or three new features a week, and so they have driven the company into the ground.