Calendly

If there was a 2.5, that would have been my rating, but I figured I'd be nice because it wasn't totally terrible.

• The base salary is competitive and the bonus structure is good.
• Benefits are very good (quarterly wellness stipend, WeWork membership, 401K match fully vested, lots of swag, almost too much).
• Reasonable work-life balance if you are not on-call (which for the monolith, is only 2-3 times a year).
• The vast majority of the ICs and line managers are really good people. I made some great connections in the relatively short time I was there.

Morale is low; I mean, it feels like defeat.

There is a general absence of engineering culture. It was bizarre. I read an earlier review about Calendly being a "strange place," and it definitely is.

There are many groups that operate in basically silos, where workloads are vastly different (too much in some, too little in others). The communication between groups is crap. By communication, I mean sharing how they are building things, asking opinions about design/architecture, etc.

There is a disproportionate emphasis put on the new product features that are a small subset of users. It still has questionable product-market fit, so it's not even clear if all this work ends up helping. Yet, they seem to freak out when there are bugs or incidents affecting that part of the product.

They use Agile, but not really. It's Waterfall mashed into Agile, which doesn't work. Might as well just make a task board; you're not iterating.

It feels like the exec team have their heads in the sand.

Turnover is high. For how reasonable the work-life balance is, it's surprising it is that high. But this is because the morale is in the toilet and the direction of the company is... who knows.

Stop chasing the additional growth s-curves. Fix up your main product, lean out operating costs, and try to get acquired.

That, or get serious about prioritization, and then trust and empower your teams to do it.

The c-suite and VP levels need to get honest as a group as to what is needed to operate together. Actually do the "mandatory reading" and have those frank discussions with each other.