Pros: Beautiful offices Great equipment Steady pay

Cons: Return to office is mandated Lower pay for industry Toxic management No direction Very behind in the agentic tech

Pros: Great engineering team, really great people to work with.

Cons: Promotions are slow and very few get promoted each cycle.

Pros: Your immediate team makes a big impact on your day to day, so if you’re on a good team you’ll have a nice bubble. Good pay. The only reason I’m still here is that I can’t find another job with comparable salary. Draper still maintains the old culture of the company pre-acquisition through team work, urgency, and a shared desire to cut through red tape.

Cons: Everything Bill touches turns to whatever the opposite color of gold is. There is a completely out of touch C level with no idea how to fix this broken product. There are constant pivots, constant reorganizations and reprioritization. The San Jose team has an incredibly toxic culture with backstabbing, politics, power grabs, and all the drama you can think of. They recently did layoffs and let go of a bunch of hard working contributors and kept a bunch of inept under performers and then held a bunch of meetings where they patted themselves on the backs for how good they did at making tough decisions. From an engineering perspective, the entire thing is a house of cards and the architecture is an absolute dumpster fire with the people in charge of fixing it having no accountability and no cohesive plan for fixing it. One day we’ll just get a 500 line MR that changes literally everyone’s area and it’s “top priority” “has to get merged in quick” and then we’ll be broken for the next two weeks trying to figure out what went wrong in those 500 lines of change. Again you can argue or protest but the people making these kinds of changes under the guise of “improvements” have zero accountability. There is no one to complain to or reprimand bad engineering at the highest levels.