Arista Networks

Small company, so RSUs have potential if you're lucky.

Management is terrible. Middle management doesn't understand how to assign people to teams, so you become a headless chicken and work for different teams each month. This prevents you from mastering any particular project and can lead to lower ratings than expected.

They initially place people in a ranking higher than their current level, so even on the first day, you're put in a position to hear, "We're paying you more than you should be making."

Tech stack is terrible. Everything used is written internally, and you can't transfer any of your knowledge. They claim to use C++, but in reality, it's an internally written language with little to no documentation. You have to ask others for everything. They use their own bug management tools, their own CI/CD tools, etc. You have to learn everything from the beginning, and your prior knowledge is mostly useless. This also causes you to become an Arista-specific employee, as this knowledge is worthless outside of Arista.

A review is a joke. This is a reviewing system similar to 360, but it's far, far worse. It works like this: you put the people you choose into an ordered list. The top person is supposed to be the highest contributor to the company's success, and the bottom person is the lowest contributor. Everyone makes their own list, and these lists are merged to create a total ranking of employees. If you're ranked lower than your expected place, too bad; you'll probably get fired.

Consider this: a new team member joins and is pretty good for a beginner, doing some good work. When the time for a review comes, there's no way to give positive feedback for them. Even though they're better than other starters, you can't rank them higher than other people because, by definition, the order is based on "contribution to the company's success." If you don't put anything for them, it's better. Adding them at the end implies they are far worse than the rest of the group. It's just a stupid system.

People are getting fired like they're nothing, creating a demoralizing and stressful work environment. I've witnessed many people being fired, some without explanation. They just lock you out of the office one day.

Management doesn't know how to rank or mentor people, let alone place them into a team. There's no team structure. You don't belong to a team; you're just someone inside Arista.

Working remotely with a team in the US from Europe is already challenging. You don't get many chances to be in meetings to get to know people, and you should expect them to remember you and write a good review when the time comes.

All I can say is I worked at Arista as a full-time employee for 4 years. Most of the time, I was under a lot of stress, felt like a failure, and was unhappy. I feel alive again after leaving the company.

Stop using a review or stop caring so much about it. It's a useless system.

Educate your middle management on social skills or choose better people.