Lots of Growth Opportunities, Lots of Tech Debt
Pros
- People tend to be given responsibility. - There are opportunities to grow, both in terms of learning technologies, but also in terms of driving projects and taking on responsibilities other than coding - interesting architectural and scale problems that come with the nature of the product - I really like most of the people I work with. They're motivated, nice, and smart. - Pre-Covid, the San Francisco office was pretty nice and had a decent snack selection. Getting free lunch and free coffee is nice. - Hackweek has been a good opportunity to try out new ideas or tech. Hoping that stays the same with the move to floating "hack days." - Pay is good - Unlimited PTO is mostly a good thing: taking time off can sometimes be hard (or hard to catch up from), but most people take more than 2-3 weeks throughout the year
Cons
- The product and systems can be quite complex, and some info on the details of how they work is tribal knowledge. - Some parts of the codebase have a lot of technical debt and take a decent amount of effort and talking with engineers experienced with them to understand. For a while, LiveRamp skewed too much towards hiring new grads and that shows in the code. Making seemingly small changes can be harder than expected because of the difficulties related to tech debt that can be discovered along the way. - Being on call can vary from a light load of checking alerts and performing some manual cleanup to a full time job for the on call engineer that can mean working some off hours or on the weekend if you're unlucky. - There a few "ownerless" systems or end-to-end product features. Making changes related to these can be hard. - Some growing pains around product intake and prioritization process. Each team has a lot of autonomy in choosing their own backlogs, which can be good in some cases, but can also mean a lot of effort is spent trying to select which few things can be done and deal with stakeholders pushing for initiatives there isn't time to do. - Some engineering management and product roles are or have been stretched thin - There can be crunch periods, depending on the team and project. - Escalations can create friction or throw a wrench in project planning.
