Atlassian

Fully remote. A lot of engineers have never been a part of a high-functioning engineering team, and it's very easy to make improvements to team processes.

Unfortunately, it means little during review time that you've enabled 20 other engineers to double their output if you haven't reached whatever arbitrary PR count they're looking for during review time.

My Atlassian rating has shifted from 5 stars to 2 stars in just the past 2 years.

It started with "I feel empowered and they care about their employees!" to...

"Well, things aren't as great anymore, but at least it's still decent." To...

"Wtf is going on here?"

Expectations are unclear. People in high positions have no direction and force lots of trash as they change their minds constantly.

Twice a year performance reviews where PR count and PR comment length are heavily weighted. Imagine drastically improving the code and your team's processes, having full support from your team and manager, then getting near review time and your manager asking you to bump up your PR count because it's not high enough.

Executives boast about giving unreasonable deadlines in the face of everyone trying to reason with them. They brag when their projects complete and don't acknowledge the late nights and weekends the teams worked to build a flashy proof of concept that won't scale.

Overall, they've set up performance reviews and hierarchy in a way that discourages collaboration and encourages individualistic heroism. Ironic for a company whose mission is to "Unleash the potential of every team."

Even if you land on a good team with better values, the toxic culture still seeps in.

Focus on making better teams that can support each other and accomplish great things, rather than "superhero" individuals who don't know how to scale their impact to the rest of the team.

Based on the current trajectory, though, I'll be back here in six months to update my review when it becomes a one-star workplace and hopefully find somewhere better to work.