There is a very dysfunctional relationship between engineering, product, and sales. The product org is mostly comprised of inexperienced PMs right out of college who don't know how to say no, and who let the salespeople tell engineers to build things that simply don't make sense from a technical perspective.
As a result, there is a lot of technical debt due to poor decisions that were motivated by a short-term goal of immediate revenue. The codebase is cluttered with snowflake applications that were built in a hacky way just to support a specific client, which leads to tons of maintenance issues. As an engineer you will spend the bulk of your time layering hack upon hack to keep some ill-conceived product going.
Naturally, on-call rotations are stressful and filled with firefighting. There are frequent "red events" throughout the engineering org where clients understandably escalate the issue because their poorly-built product is now breaking, and you are pressed to fix things in the fastest way possible. You rarely have the luxury of doing the right long-term fix, because once you're done with this crisis we're on to the next one (or you've been tasked with quickly building the next ill-conceived product that sales just signed a million-dollar contract for). And the recent developments in privacy regulations further increase the burden on engineering to build more artificial complexity into their systems, making things even more brittle.
If you're someone who wants to grow technically, there's really not much to be gained in this environment. You will waste years of your life trying to understand the logic behind convoluted database models and navigating around historical artifacts in the code, rather than learning about good engineering principles.
