A lot of the company feels disjointed. There are so many acquisitions that never get "fully" integrated, leaving wildly different management and operational styles within the org. If you can find your "fit" on a team that already operates smoothly and is well managed, you'll likely have a good (maybe even great) experience. If you end up on one of the more dysfunctional teams, it will constantly be an uphill battle. Unfortunately, I ended up in the latter category and am not getting the support I need to be able to successful in this role.
Work-life balance is also highly variable depending on what team you get on. Some teams (namely customer-facing) get the short straw here. One example is Smarsh has a "take what you need" time off policy. Except if you're on a customer-facing team, then they do limit how much time-off you can take. For other teams, which are busy or short-handed, you may be able to take the time off, but the work just piles up until you return. There's no expectation that your team helps take on some of that workload.
This company has grown beyond what you could consider as a "startup" but they still have that mentality. There is so much "tribal knowledge" that when someone leaves Smarsh, they take all that knowledge with them. This leaves gaping holes that are very hard to fill.
There are promises made to integrate workflows, removing some of the product silos and giving a better balance to what teams are required to handle, but so far that hasn't happened in any meaningful way. It may just be that this is a much larger and longer term project than I'm thinking, but can you expect people to hang on with the promise of "it will get better" if that means suffering unbearable workloads and constant changes in business direction for 3+ years?
Some teams are severely understaffed and it's hard to know if this is just a matter of churn (which takes time to hire, get onboarded and trained, etc.) or if the teams responsible for approving staffing levels are just oblivious to the need for more people. Being on one of those teams means that you'll be asked to do so much, and get pushed so hard, until you burn out and quit. This has happened to a number of people on my team, and is happening to me now.
Solutions Engineers are not expected to have a working technical knowledge of the products they are selling, often relying on Support or Product teams to fill in those gaps and answer customer questions and concerns.
The heavily pushed business initiatives are very Sales oriented. Sell, Sell, SELL... but no accountability for if things are miss-sold. If something is miss-sold, it's up to teams beyond Sales to make it work, or be the ones to tell the clients the service they just purchased won't actually work for them.
Customer issues and bugs are largely ignored until a customer gets upset enough to escalate to the VP/Executive Level. Then the teams that would be responsible for working on that issue have to drop everything to focus on that item. On the other side, attempts to prioritize work to resolve customer issues before they escalate, are undermined by the people "in charge" who don't understand the value of keeping the customers happy rather than putting everything into the eternal push of progress for progress' sake.
