Data driven company, drives people into the ground
Pros
Free food at a high price
Cons
The company is data driven which translates to they don't really care about people. I worked at Instacart as a senior data engineer and I observed the following: 1) Managers manage people by fear, constant pestering and micromanaging, I had never seen a company where people are afraid of managers to the extent that they can't even joke around them until I came to Instacart 2) Mangers hold supreme power and company works in very shady ways like firing employees before they reach their 1 year anniversary so the people never get the options they were promised 3) Upper management makes a big show of engineers going above and beyond each week rather than figuring out why people HAVE to go above and beyond each week, the culture is broken 4) No training or proper leadership, when things fail "RCA"'s are created under the guise of documenting failures but are nothing more than finger pointing, and finding someone to blame 5) For major failures first thing managers ask their teams to do is figure out how much of the blame lies on their team and once that is found they proceed to find ways of not taking any blames 6) On-call rotation was the worst, spent 20 straight hours awake monitoring constantly breaking processes for multiple teams and was told that I'm not meeting the Rubric standard for a senior engineer in month 2 of employment. I told them that Rubric standard won't be met after I'm being asked to work for more than 15 hours. 7) People clinging to old failed processes since people who built these processes got too high up in the company so their work is not questioned 8)Engineers are stressed beyond belief and are waiting to leave company on 1 year anniversary if they can make it there at all 9) Long term engineers show signs of mental breakdown from stress 10) I didn’t see one day where people were relaxed and smiling In conclusion, This company is not worth working for, this company is a stop gap solution for retailers until they can ramp up their own delivery processes to compete with Wholefoods just like Safeway and Target did.
