Pros
United is genuinely a good place to work in a lot of ways. The dev side has strong leadership, the work is interesting, and there are real engineers doing real things. When I started, I was proud to tell people where I worked.
Cons
The Quality Engineering org has gone downhill fast since the leadership change about two years ago. It's hard to overstate how much the culture has shifted. The focus now is almost entirely on offshoring roles to India, and the US team has been quietly squeezed—people being nudged toward retirement, others suddenly finding themselves with negative performance feedback after years of solid work. It doesn't feel issue-driven, it feels like a headcount strategy with a polite cover story.
On top of that, we spent most of last year implementing process changes that look impressive in a slide deck but don't actually move the needle. Meanwhile, the QE org has drifted away from what the dev leadership is actually trying to build. We're solving problems no one asked us to solve while the real priorities sit on the side. It's frustrating to watch, especially when you know what this team used to be capable of.
The day-to-day environment has gotten noticeably toxic. People are checked out, the good ones are looking, and there's a real sense that institutional knowledge is being treated as disposable.