Box

• Lots of room to stretch your legs and take initiative.
• Excellent engineers working on hard problems in all corners of the engineering org.
• Very product-focused.
• The company has a clear vision and it's well-communicated by the management.
• Lots of great managers that care about their teams deeply.
• Excellent benefits and perks.

Lots of technical debt that piles up. Sometimes too product-focused; long-standing problems don't get resolved. Teams are unevenly balanced. Some teams are jam-packed with very senior engineers, and some are exclusively junior engineers. Very strong NIH attitude. Third-party solutions are often rejected for silly reasons. Lots of internal tension between teams, especially around resources. Managers can get extremely territorial over engineer time and even code.

1. Redistribute senior engineers more evenly across teams.
2. Cut your losses and kill off the projects that don't matter. Forget the sunk costs.
3. Cut the projects that are reinventing the wheel. Box is not a special snowflake.
4. Invest more heavily in polishing UX. It's not sexy work, but it makes the customers happy.
5. Invest much more heavily in cleaning up tech debt. The job's not over until the mess is cleaned up.