Great product and work-life balance, but culture is headed in the wrong direction
Pros
It's really a great business with a great product and product reputation. Work life balance is good. Honestly, I don't even mind the RTO mandates as long as it stays hybrid - the Toronto office is great. Some of the home-made tools being developed to speed up development with AI are actually pretty neat.
Cons
The culture in Engineering is turning really sour. I get the impression they're slowly trying to eliminate the People Manager role, which is "fine" until you realize that they have no interest in helping you grow and advance your career here. It's really sad to see, especially for those of us earlier in our careers who do want to move up and stick around long enough to see ourselves AND the business grow. They're trying to eliminate 1-1s under the guise of productivity and shipping out faster and getting managers more involved in dev work. And it does not look like the managers have much of a say. For the most part, you're seen as a replaceable code/feature monkey. Turnover is increasing, especially with those tenured, senior folks, and I don't think they care. Another issue I've ran into is the varying skill level of engineers. There are great engineers here. But, there are some engineers here who just entirely vibe code. And that behaviour is highly encouraged and seen as "impactful" in some teams. Well don't come crying when incidents have increased over the last 6 months then? To be fair, it is entirely team-dependent and some teams have a higher calibre, some lower.
