* The company is massively indebted to a private equity firm which drives all decision-making, including a hare-brained scattershot approach to layoffs.
* Senior "leadership" espouses customer-centric priorities but is actually focused on driving sales even if it means lying to customers about features/services that the company can effectively provide. They also clearly don't care about customers given the fact their February 2019 layoffs included support engineers who were actively troubleshooting customer support requests.
* My impression working at Rackspace was that leadership was in name only. I observed widespread employee disengagement, an incompetent manager who would (ironically) disparage his own manager in front of his direct reports, and seemingly random technical decision-making that focused more on engineer preferences than on customer needs.
* Job titles mean nothing. There is literally no distinction (implicit or explicit) between engineer I, II, III, IV, V. During my time working at this company I worked closely with "staff" and "principal" engineers who acted more like technically competent junior engineers -- they rarely ventured outside the narrow confines of their own subject matter expertise, did nothing to mentor less experienced engineers, and had no concept whatsoever of how to build consensus within a team.
* The company has no standard career growth framework and managers don't seem to understand they are responsible for giving their direct reports the kind of feedback necessary to grow professionally. Working here is more likely to harm your career growth than advance it, unless you are foolish enough to think that promotion == career growth.
* While it's nice to be able to work full time remote, the company is pretty tone deaf to the experience of remote employees. For example, the company periodically organizes special events at the HQ in San Antonio and blasts emails about them to the whole company, including remote workers. I'm sorry, but I don't care if y'all are drinking beer and eating free food if I am not going to be included in any way.
