Pay is worse than similar jobs in the area. You won't learn nearly as much as you would at a similar job in other tech companies, either. WLB has a major asterisk. Some managers ride specific employees to where they're working nights and weekends, other teams barely work 6hrs/day. It's very dependent on team.
Leadership absolutely hated seeing any numbers that would show poor performance, (even when that was the reality), so I had to constantly find work arounds and spins on numbers to paint them in a positive light. It was absolutely exhausting and prevented us from actually engaging with WHY those numbers were bad in the first place.
Technology leadership became cut throat in all the worst ways. Teams had overlapping responsibilities to create the "If you're not first, you're last" mentality, which killed collaboration and made managers have to justify the existence of their teams. There used to be a really collaborative culture in the Technology organization and it died a few years back. Leadership prioritizes "Yes Men" over all else. Push back? Good luck getting promoted.
Promotions are few and far between and there are a lot of political games to get on management's good side.
There's a self-serving cycle that only the most well-known engineers get the most interesting/high visibility projects, which gets them recognition, gets them the next big project, etc. Lesser known engineers then do all the operational work on those projects and don't get any opportunities to break free from that cycle or get any meaningful visibility.
Spread the love around.
Also, Mike couldn't get a Golden Retreiver motivated to play fetch, much less motivate a workforce to get excited about how they're going to cut or cheaper an existing feature for customers.
