- EPD team is going through some rough growing pains. Overall velocity slowing down and there’s a lot of process overhead.
- There’s a lot tech debt that can sometimes make development slow and painful, yet tech debt doesn’t seem to be a priority compared to churning out features. There’s a lot of legacy code (e.g. Backbone) that lives in a huge monolith and people are afraid to touch it out of fear of breaking things. There was at team created to move us toward a more service-oriented architecture, but they’ve existed for over a year now and I haven’t seen anything come out of that other than GraphQL errors that cause our build to flake.
- The development experience is getting worse. It takes so long to start the app locally and there's always random issues that cause things to break.
- The folks here are passionate about the mission and the work, but watch out for management expecting longer hours / extra work under the guise of “ownership mentality” without proper compensation, recognition, and leveling. Passion work only goes so far.
- On a similar note, high performers are not recognized appropriately (nor are they compensated). There are no bonuses, and the difference in the annual raise for someone meeting expectations vs exceeding expectations is so negligible that it's almost insulting.
- Everyone being “full stack” doesn’t scale, especially when “full stack” here means mostly back end. Need to hire for more specialized skillsets (area-specific such as mobile and front end, or stack-specific such as React and Rails) and ensure there’s a healthy mix of skillsets, especially on product teams.
- Culture around low performers is too lax and some folks are taking advantage of it. When people aren't meeting expectations, it can take a long time to address it, which can bring down the morale of other teammates.
