Symbotic reviews

Politics: The highly political sway of Walmart influence drives scary technical decisions --when you look at the decisions at the ground level there is a vast amount of malfunction. If you publicly voice a competing design or proposal, you find yourself shut down and marginalized. Symbotic's executive leadership comes from the grocery chain industry, not technology/engineering. As a result, the engineering language and impact is lost in translation. High Turnover: In less than a year, the entire interview team of 9+ people I interviewed with was gone. The only exception was the hiring manager, but that person transitioned into a different role. Additionally, the company is heavily leveraged in off-shore software consulting, which also plays a highly problematic role in the retention of key domain knowledge. Deep Technical Debt: The software stack used for >90% of the systems has long become obsolete or end of life. The nature of the monolithic software architecture makes it impossible to rectify since the extreme inter-coupling of systems requires massive, "big-bang" updates that are risky and error prone. The codebase is likely to remain this way indefinitely or until the company hires an external agency to rebuild it from the ground-up in parallel to maintaining the existing infrastructure. The system is a case study for Tracy Kidder's non-fiction work "The Soul of a New Machine".

I've been at Symbotic for more than three years and left in 2017 when it seemed there is hardly any hope left. I've seen the previous leadership transition from Tony Affuso to Chris Gahagan. While Affuso wasn't a technology leader, he was respectful of talent and knew how to manage people. Gahagan's reign began with some promise, but after a few months turned into the most toxic and disrespectful environment I've seen in my career. Upper management (mostly Gahagan's cronies) has been the biggest problem for Symbotic in the last couple of years. They have no vision beyond slave-driving employees (who end up running away), blaming others for their own mistakes, and devising endless plans and "initiatives" that have very little relation to reality. I pity the next company that will hire Chris Gahagan for any kind of management role. As for Symbotic, if it could overcome his toxic legacy, it could be on the right path and fulfill at least some of its potential.