LTK reviews

Product: The product team has been working to smooth out it’s process and gain more influence over the business. Unfortunately their ultimate concern is with delivering the hottest features and circle jerking road maps. It will be impossible for these people to have a consistent vision for the future without understanding what our core competencies actually are. They have given important products to under qualified team members and promoted incompetence. Entire teams have left because of a product owner, but there has been no response. Engineering is tired of last minute fires and reactionary demands. Advice: Leave your bubble and challenge yourself Engineering: By and large the complaints you will see here are from engineers. They would have you think their Google tier skills are compromised by a toxic and constantly changing environment. While it may be a system where agile and road maps are abused and dictated, these snowflakes fail to mention that they can’t deliver basic CRUD apps or data pipelines without turning it into an over-complicated stack nightmare. There needs to be a discussion on what MVP actually means, and it’s not composing your entire stack or spending months of company time to build out your heavily nuanced deployment system. There are many over titled engineers and some are leaving the company to find out the hard way where they actually stand. Advice: Walk the walk Leadership: Politics has infested the company with the regime change from last year and with no oversight to the games being played the landscape is changing. Power and leverage is being brought in from all sides and winners are already being picked. Dead projects from dank citizens are being resuscitated as big wins for people who get to “deliver”. This favoritism won’t be unnoticed and hasn’t been. By the time you get done rewarding these people your actual 20% doing 80% won’t settle for a title bump, or wait around for a benefits overhaul. Who fires someone on Christmas? Advice: Show where your loyalties lie

But now here's the ugly: engineering is extremely mismanaged and are often the ones to blame when anything goes wrong / off schedule. Product changes priorities often and gives no time for any team to adjust. Engineering gets "re-org'd" practically once every 6-8 months, as the previous "re-org" is often times considered a failure (much like engineering as a whole no matter what happens). The most recent re-org was spawned by the fact that we decided to lay off an entire office. After losing 12+ engineers, we needed to figure out how to move their projects to the rest of the team. After 2 days of planning, the re-org was announced, but was not fully in effect until a month later, despite being told it was effective immediately. Other projects lost team members to fill the gap, without much consideration to what effect this would have on the projects. During the holidays, we had another "round" of layoffs conveniently happening before the new year! If you do not know, "rSTheFamily" is a little saying that this company has - we consider our employees like family. Yet, that does not seem to be the case; even though it's quite an inhumane thing to do that I have never seen this company do before, apparently laying off during the holiday season out of nowhere is the new standard for how you'd treat your "rSTheFamily." This company has absolutely no tact, in terms of planning or in its actions. Morale has plunged, and it no longer feels like the fun place to work that it once was. Additionally, it feels like there is no room for advancement here. Engineers are not given many opportunities to grow. Going to conventions happens very rarely, training of any sort is not offered and has not been offered. Oh whoops, besides professional management training that is offered to those in management, only. Besides that, you're on your own. Lastly, the review system here is incredibly toxic. Last year the review system got an update to be a simple 1-5 scale, but 4 and 5 were unattainable. If you were rated a 4 or 5 by your manager, you’d be bumped down to a 3 and told you were not good enough. HR promised a revamp (in October) in time for this year’s reviews, but nothing changed, save for some wording. Still 1-5. 4 is more attainable, but only slightly! Remember, your contributions as an individual do not matter! If the product team destroyed your projects, it is your fault! :)! rewardStyle is by no means a 2 star place to work. All things considered, it’s probably one of the better places to enjoy your day-to-day. However, it is definitely a 2 star place to develop as a professional and to feel any measure of success.