Affirm

Interesting product space. Great benefits.

Let's be frank, every company has its issues. Affirm is no different.

Why do I have such contempt for Affirm these days? Several reasons, but let's start off simple: its immense tech debt.

I know, I know, all companies have tech debt. However, I have never disliked working in a codebase/tech stack even close to as much as I do working on Affirm's. From unit tests to integration testing to staging to production deploys to language/repo tooling to telemetry, I cannot think of a single part of our tech stack that meets baseline requirements. It certainly shows.

We have regular outages (e.g., a two-part, two-day outage spanning a total of 8 hours in late 2021) and are still running our core services in Python 2 (it is the middle of 2022).

It is easy to understand why; we relentlessly prioritize new product initiatives over fixing our decrepit stack. Once again, I will acknowledge this is typical in industry. But the state of our tech stack is simply not tenable and has only gotten worse these past couple of years. I would recommend not joining Affirm solely due to this issue.

Don't even get me started on the abysmal engineering culture. Briefly, there is no cultural expectation to support other teams, and doing so is a glorified exception instead of the standard.

If people truly do come first, tell management to prioritize their engineers. The engineers have always known what to do, just have never been empowered to do so.