- Above-average level of politics (favoritism, obstruction, showmanship, pandering) within management
- Managers don't grow employees, just a pass-through for blame and responsibility
- Managers, ICs have little power to make decisions, decisions are made from VP/exec level with little transparency
- Some with long tenure refuse to go to meetings, refuse to answer questions, and stall work from being done
- Exec leadership is a very closed group that is an echo chamber for the CEO
- Products are figure-it-out-yourself with no specs or documentation
- Competitiveness between teams means others are blocked from making progress on their own deliverables
- Innovation is choked due to continuous disagreement on a path forward
- Some code has no owners and require you to reverse engineer the code to learn it's function
- Weird model where if the owning team doesn't have time to work on something, engineers must make the changes themselves in code they don't know and own that piece going forward
- Some teams hire exclusively from FAANG companies
- Performance reviews are just a single number without much substantiation
- "Can I have a beer with this person?" was a question used by managers to decide on candidates
- VP review of interview candidates cause numerous candidates with all "yes" feedback to be thrown out
- They talk about diversity then continue to hire non-diverse senior and executive leadership
- Leadership doubled down on return to office and then at the last second turned around due to internal protest
