Great work/life balance but soul sucking
Pros
Under manager level designers don't work overtime and aren't expected to. If you land in the right department the people are fabulous, and as a nonbinary person my pronouns and identity were treated with respect, which continues to surprise me. In my department product team functions had strong working relationships and mutual respect. My department goes to lengths to not lay designers off, which I appreciate a lot. If I didn't hate the corporate environment I'd probably stay for a longer time.
Cons
This place is very corporate, no surprise. Devs, managers, and PM/POs do not get to enjoy the same work/life balance. It's nearly impossible to get promoted beyond a grade level 15 (unofficially senior designer level). The requirements to get promoted get harder to achieve every year and the design team is huge so there's cut-throat competition to get bumped up to 16, meanwhile some departments over-estimated hires at the start and have really incompetent people at 16+. It really sucks to be mentoring people who get paid more than yourself. RTO is increasingly being tightened up. The company pretends to be agile, but waterfall rules, making roadmaps, releases, and incremental improvements incredibly difficult to get out. MVPs take ages to complete and many get abandoned after release. It seems to me that many product initiatives are the brain child of one of the execs, with no regard for what the user actually wants.
