Painful Truth About a Dissapointing Decline
Pros
This place used to be great. I really enjoyed working here so it pains me to write such a critical review. - Turo has historically hired great people. Most everyone is super friendly and willing to help out. The culture used to be awesome, but has been declining significantly over the last year. - Middle management is really solid and they genuinely care. Most managers are engineers who were promoted from within. You can see their code all over the codebase which lends them a lot of credibility. Unfortunately they seem powerless to actually effect change that might combat upper management's commitment to crushing morale. - Despite benefit recent benefit cuts, the healthcare plans are solid. Other essential benefits remain decent. - Even though our RSU's were converted to options at a less than favorable exchange rate, we get to keep them after we leave. Probably won't apply to future grants though. - Work life balance was great. We had a lot of flexibility between our PTO and working remote. This will likely go away when we are forced back into the office and institute a "performance based culture"
Cons
- Nice to have benefits have been cut significantly. - RSU's converted to options have become more like monopoly money than a real motivating factor. - Layoffs were chaotic without a lot of reasoning. We laid off a some people who were good at their job and then kept many that are just feature pushers. - We haven't had a real pay increase in over a year. Last cycle most people got 1%. Top performers got 3%. This cycle there will be compensation increases "only by exception." - Return to office feels forced and punitive. MWF is out of line with the rest of the industry which do TWTh or 3 days of choice. - Upper management has gone on record saying they think people are "slacking" while working remote despite turning our negative numbers around in 6 months time. Those that don't like return to office are replaceable/expendable. - Upper management refuses to listen to feedback. Talent is slowly bleeding out as a result. - The tech stack is miserably outdated on the BE. We run a version of Java and Spring Boot that is well past end of life. We have a giant poorly maintained monolith. We still write our own DAO's by hand. Tech debt remediation is considered a burden by the business and is not in the cards anytime soon. Must. Push. Features.