Morale in the services side of the company is pretty low (services being Ads, Analytics, Infrastructure Engineering, etc.). "Empire building" is the norm as teams fight for political power (aka ownership of projects / products / infrastructure) within the company before the mystical IPO date. Teams are bleeding talent as competent engineers quit to escape the toxicity of constant doublespeak that aims to minimize accountability. In order to hire fast enough to compensate for the attrition, recruiters will blatantly lie to potential candidates regarding how valuable the stock options are and how close the IPO date is. They will be misled into believing that their work can actually have tremendous impact, when in reality they are all treated as replaceable coding monkeys churning out piles of code for endless migrations.
There is also no hope for any career growth, as HR has an official policy of "no paperwork": you are expected to simply have quarterly "check-ins" with your manager regarding your performance. This approach is marketed to new hires as "novel" and "innovative", when in reality the only innovation is that it completely absolves managers from blame when arbitrary decisions are made for (denying) promotions or raises.
This all comes back to the nonexistent work-life balance that you will be faced with if you have any ability to write code. Due to the lack of accountability, and the ping-pong'ing of project ownership, other team's projects will suddenly land in your lap which you are now expected to maintain, due to yet another "re-org". You will be pinged at midnight for an urgent bug-fix so that your manager doesn't get chewed out by his manager (deliberate use of the male pronoun here, because female engineers are near nonexistent, much less female engineering managers). And when the dust settles, all of your work will be taken for granted as being simply "part of the job" because there's no paperwork associated with how much you bust your balls to get things done. Your only hope of ever achieving any career advancement is how much you've managed to make your manager like you, and so begins the toxic cycle of only promoting those who can suck up the most.
It's quite a pity. And of course, there's exceptions to the commentary mentioned above (once in a blue moon, someone competent gets promoted). But the day-to-day still wears on the psyche of any sane person, and until upper management acknowledges these all to be real problems, there will be no hope for improvement.
