Good people, but difficult environment for engineering leadership - Engineering Manager Smartly Employee Review

The culture is difficult to sustain from an engineering perspective. Sales drives most customer commitments, which leads to constant context switching, shifting priorities, and unnecessary pressure on teams. In practice, this can mean long days or weekend work to deliver features that end up seeing little or no real usage. Escalations are frequent and often handled in a way that prioritizes individual accountability over shared ownership. The dynamic is less about solving problems together and more about avoiding blame, which reinforces reactive behavior instead of predictable delivery. Engineering managers are put in a particularly difficult position. They are accountable for delivery, but have limited influence over prioritization and tradeoffs. This makes it hard to improve how teams work or build anything sustainable. There has also been noticeable turnover in engineering management, which further reduces continuity and makes long-term improvements difficult to maintain.