The last 3 years have been the worst 3 professional years of my life. This is a terrible company to work for and I am not just saying this. I am providing explanation for as to why I think it is:
1. Engineering got exponentially worse: There are no clear boundaries between which team owns what. Sometimes, multiple teams own the same things and at other times, no team owns a particular codebase.
2. Biased: It appears like titles are just handed to people without much thought. Unfortunately, Glassdoor doesn’t let you name names. But there is one who is certainly not a manager material. Reeks of nepotism or favoritism. You only get recognized if you cozy up to the manager and VP.
3. Poor Product: The product is riddled with bugs. There have been back-to-back days where incidents were created because the app crashed as it couldn’t handle the load. Shows the thought put into the architecture. I pity the students and teachers using this product. And to make things worse, management got rid of the product team, who had some sense of what was going on, and replaced them with someone who wants to ruin the product further by making everything AI-centric.
4. AI bandwagon: I was lucky enough to get out before the AI fever inevitably gripped this company. But from what I have been hearing, they are mandating employees to use Claude/Codex for every single thing. Apparently, performance is literally based on number of tokens you use and number of AI assisted PRs you create. Investors really need to stem this money bleed and knock some sense into the management.
5. Poor benefits: No 401k match. An ok health insurance at best. Below average wages.