Company is sales focused, not product focused. Quality of products takes a back seat to selling to more clients or acquiring more companies and this takes a toll on engineering job satisfaction. Features are short-sightedly decided upon based on sales contracts or client requests instead of building the best product possible for the market and the company long term.
Lots of deadlines you have little say over as an engineer. Job is very demanding and can consume more than 40 hours of your time per week. I've had to work unpaid weekends before and so have my peers. Working overtime was not seen as cause for alarm and change by management.
Company's tech stack and approach to product development will turn into a career limiting factor for you as an engineer. You will be assigned to working with tech from over a decade ago most of the time, and for anything remotely new you'll be prescribed instructions from your seniors with not much room for personal learning. This combined with the demands of engineering here it's likely that you will have a difficult time finding your next job after this company.
Salary is terribly low here and so are merit cycles. Found out my peers and I were paid much lower than market average. During the height of COVID our executive team bragged of excellent financial health and acquisitions while also cutting raises for everyone in the company. When the economy stabilized the company did not take actions to make salaries equitable with the market again.
At best, managers here have no idea what promotion criteria are and don't have time to help you develop your career within the company.
Working with contractors here was the worst. There's a 12+ hour time difference, meaning your meetings will be at unsavory times. You will be forced to attend and lead these meetings, because despite demanding meeting times where they can be present, the contractors add little to nothing in terms of discussion material in meetings. I found them to be incapable of doing independent work that didn't require major cleanup from the main development teams. They are a guaranteed headache if you work here.
Product and Engineering leadership do not work together and spread engineers thinly, causing an overall lack of focus. The two aforementioned groups seem to be unable to communicate the value of their backlogs to one another, so instead they keep their deadlines and spread the work 50/50 every sprint. This causes work on both sides to be rushed and generate tech debt that the backlogs simply do not allow for. The prospect of your team being under-resourced to deal with conflicting critical deadlines is a guarantee.
The company's approach to Agile/Scrum is largely ineffective. The Agile processes have not evolved at all to better marry the Product and Development departments and are basically velocity checks to ensure that teams deliver their estimated story points every sprint and not a point less (or more!). Scrum Masters are not incentivized to optimize for team process improvements or better dynamics, just to ensure that velocity metrics look good on paper to executives. Extra time found at the end of sprints is not seen as time for training or dealing with tech debt, but a sign that your team did not commit to 100% of it's possible utilization, and that you will be pushed harder in an upcoming sprint to commit to more.
Backlogs and objectives for teams are created Waterfall-style. This means that leadership will define roadmaps and deadlines, and then hand them to Engineers and BAs to figure it out and make it happen with little wiggle room to revise the original plans when they are inevitably wrong, very empowering!
Engineering leadership at the VP level and below has no vision beyond what is immediately asked of them by the CTO. The whiplash from reactionary leadership causes a lot of fatigue and disengagement over long periods of time. It has created a marked absence of desire to build any kind of engineering org that is fulfilling, proactive, and industry leading.
