Pros: Braze serves a critical use case for a wide variety of customers. Many of your favorite companies use Braze.It is nice to work in a system where high throughput and reliability are core concerns for customers, not just the engineers.

Cons: The work-life balance has headed downhill. Low level managers are burnt out and are not able to have focused goals. Both ICs as well as low level managers are working much harder for lower pay. As a result execution suffers. I expect attrition to follow. Second, in the name of “compliance” we are not allowed to do automated deployments anymore. Previously deployments used to be flawless, nowadays there’s a human error in our manual deployments almost every week. The tradeoff that the higher levels of management made here - removing automated deployments in the name of “compliance” boggles my mind and reduces trust in the decision making. Finally, there are limited channels to share feedback like this with management. We get comments like this “that’s not very productive”.

Pros: There is solid pay and a good moat in the industry.

Cons: Vibes became adversarial following shift in market conditions. Uptick in frequency and severity of IRTs due to constant pressure to ship. Everybody looking after their own backs.

Pros: * Very smart coworkers who care a lot about our customers and product * Engineering leadership is dialed in and active in day-to-day * Good engineering practices and a desire to improve developer experience * We work with big customers everyone knows

Cons: * Stock price seems stuck * Customers use the product in unexpected ways that create support burdens. This varies by team.