Your leaders will be directionless, seemingly set up to fail. They will limit you from doing what actually should be done. Across multiple product groups, you start to wonder what the point of you and your teams coding is when there is no or little measurable customer output. You can't fix this, the more you try to make the situation better, the more of a target you become.\
The entire AI (coding, feature) push in this company is insanity. Leadership has lost their minds over this and crippled what was once an incredible engineering culture, and for what?
They have fired exceptional engineers over basic ai criticisms, throwing away any trust engineering had in them.
Nobody talks about how AI coding tools are actually useful. You just have to use them and pretend it's great. All the high level engineers have seemingly sold their souls to get in any positive AI comments, as if there's even a problem it's going to solve.
Everyone has put the blinders on to the AI landscape. Nobody wants to talk about how crazy expensive this all is, how there is no actual future in the AI companies out there. So why follow this trend?
They measure everything you are doing. AI tooling usage, developer metrics, slack posts. You are under their thumb - which means you either follow whatever expectations you can figure out to the letter, or you get fired. What kind of culture is this? They claim it's a high performance culture, but nothing about this makes for high performance. It's just programmers performance, by the way - you will actually see the peter principle in action as the SEMs and PGLs, who have made huge failure after huge failure, still get promoted!
What's the point of it? There's so much unnecessary pressure on engineering to move faster, except the product part of the company is in total disarray. You can put out as much code as you like, without a decent direction and goal, it doesn't actually do anything.
It's all just unbelievable. I worked with some of the smartest engineers in my career during my time here. I saw the infrastructure team build up possibly the best infrastructure on the planet. I worked with some of the most passionate people, from engineering to support. There was a genuine effort to focus on the work, on building a solid product. As soon as the AI craze began, it was just.. thrown away. Our bosses were so ready to take any chance at making more money, at replacing workers.
If you are going to work here, don't work here to excel, don't work here to push yourself. Just figure out what your boss cares about, what metrics you're being measured on, hit those, and do nothing more.
