Toxic, inconsistent leadership and zero psychological safety
Pros
• Exposure to modern cloud, security, and compliance work (AWS, Terraform, FedRAMP-style environments) • Smart engineers on the ground doing their best despite the chaos • Opportunity to touch multiple parts of the stack quickly
Cons
• Leadership operates in constant reaction mode with no real planning, strategy, or stable roadmap • Policies are vague by design and enforced selectively depending on the situation or who’s involved • Executive leadership frequently overrides decisions, undermining managers and creating confusion across teams • Expectations shift constantly, often without acknowledging dependencies or constraints outside your control • Accountability is pushed downward, engineers are blamed for systemic issues they don’t own • Work-life balance is not respected; boundaries can be ignored whenever “business needs” are invoked • Communication is inconsistent and often changes retroactively, leaving teams scrambling • Culture is performative—what’s presented externally does not match the internal reality • Psychological safety is effectively nonexistent; decisions feel arbitrary and job security is unclear
