It's easy to get pigeonholed into being the only person who knows something, and your manager may gaslight you into thinking the role is better than it is in order to keep you from looking elsewhere. The lack of structured career growth is not acceptable compared to competing software companies that help their younger employees chart a path significantly better. Recent changes have improved this situation but significantly more needs to be done. Pay is undercompetitive for the software industry and has not kept up with recent inflation. The under-market pay is no longer outweighed by any perceived cultural benefits. Never really completed any modernization initiative in technology, org structure, engineering practices, etc. As a result, is constantly 5-10 years behind in widespread adoption of modern software industry practices. This is made more difficult by not really being a "software" company - the structure of the company never really evolved to meet modern software organizational standards despite several attempted transformations (e.g. "into a service company" a decade ago or "doing devops" five years ago - both thinks that Mark D would champion at All-Hands until they stopped getting talked about as though they were "done"). Org structure has significantly more overhead/middle management than is required in comparable organizations. There is an incredible volume of bureaucracy to getting any project prioritized, and priorities change on the whims of a competitive and disjointed middle management layer. This results in very little control over those projects for the rank-and-file working on them, and everybody (middle management included) feels like they are being prevented from doing their job by everybody else. The strongly-advertised company culture does not match with the reality of working at Viasat and is mostly aspirational. The reality of Viasat's dysfunction inhibits the supposedly positive culture from making up for the under-competitive pay.
