Once Great, Now Just Okay
Pros
* Catered lunch on two of the three mandatory in-office days—if you consider that a perk rather than just a consolation prize for the commute. * A professional development stipend now exists, even if it’s less generous than the benefits it replaced. * Corporate Libby account, for when you want the company to feel like it’s generously gifting you the same thing your local library offers for free. * Great place if you enjoy completing essays disguised as self-reviews.
Cons
* The forced Return-to-Office policy is now three days a week, up from two, creating logistical nightmares for both in-office and remote employees. Hope you like traffic and canceled childcare arrangements! * Once-envied perks, like unlimited vacation outside the U.S. and reimbursement for personal development, are gone. You can still read books or upskill, but only if it aligns with *company-approved* professional goals, and while it hasn't officially happened yet, it’s only a matter of time before the U.S. "unlimited vacation" policy is redefined to "unlimited requests for time off, subject to approval." * Internet and wellness stipends slashed—because apparently working from home doesn’t involve actual costs. * Removal of Slack titles to "protect higher-ups" is a fascinating exercise in transparency. Definitely not dystopian. * "Pulse" surveys are semi-anonymous and semi-useful. Management sees them as more of a ritual than a tool for actual change. * A growing divide between remote and in-office workers: the former are treated like second-class citizens, while the latter anxiously wait to see if their in-office days will increase at a moment’s notice. * A cumbersome self-review process that focuses more on company-defined "impact" than personal goals. You’ll spend days crafting answers just to be graded on a rigid 6-point scale that’s designed to make nearly everyone feel mediocre. * Legacy systems create a chaotic workday. A single deployment can derail hours of work, and issues caused by other teams will become your problem faster than you can say “monolith.” * Office overcrowding solved not by loosening RTO policies, but by evicting employees from their desks and instituting a hot-desking system—with a cheerful CEO assuring us this is "progress." * Recruiters aren't dishonest but aren't clairvoyant either. The role you're hired for might change drastically between the offer letter and your start date. * No staging or QA environment, which means every deployment is a roll of the dice. One wrong move, and it’s straight to the production servers—where, naturally, everything goes perfectly... until it doesn’t.