== Oblivious Management ==
After airing our grievances in an anonymous Q&A at a large meeting, the CTO got defensive and said all of this is new to him and blamed us for not raising our concerns to him. Trouble is, ICs and middle management have not been silent. We'd been saying the same things since before the CTO joined.
Either leadership is unwilling/unable to make reforms, or they're oblivious to what's going on on the ground. Neither speaks well of their competence.
== Cronyism ==
Upper management is a problem. After a certain high-level person joined, senior positions became filled with people from Ticketmaster and Fandango. Since we went public, title inflation has reached meme levels: We directors and VPs with only one direct report, usually an IC.
Got negative feedback for someone at the director level or higher in the engineering org? Forget it. It'll get lost on its way up the chain, even if multiple people give the same feedback. There are some toxic employees that need to be fired but are somehow immune. True or not, the optics are bad: they appear to be protected by friends higher up. Remember, there are a lot of people from the same two companies up there. Some of them know each other, even followed each other here.
== Little Stability ==
Don't expect it. For the last two years we've reorganized about once a quarter. Some people get switched to teams with different domains than they're used to with no consultation or even against their wishes. Others don't move.
== Career Path? Eh... ==
If what you do isn't obviously revenue-generating or demonstrable cool UIs or graphs, then getting a promotion is an uphill battle compared to some of your other peers.
