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: 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: Pay was solid, and the non-techinical team seemed fun.

Cons: Best Ruby practices were not followed at all, and the CTO and co-founder were involved in the codebase and enforced style decisions that were against Rails norms. Management judged engineers by lines of code written