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Flexible hours, in-house chefs and drinks, not bad compensation, very pet-friendly as long as you pick up after them, other allowances to help you skill up, hybrid work environment.

The development ecosystem is very rigid, down to code reviews.

There is no freedom to be creative with coding or design.

I found the “consistency” argument thrown at me several times. Even while using a particular API, I was told to use APIs that were used more frequently in other parts of the code. So, I had to search other parts of the code to see how many times an API was used and then compare it with the more creative solution I had in mind.

If mine was better in any objective way, I found that it was quickly shut down with no explanation.

Design docs require months of comments, discussions, and approvals just to get a simple CRUD service up and running.

All of these are enforced at a granular level with a “my way or the highway” mentality, even for senior engineers.

There is no polyglot freedom or areas where I could work on more frameworky or open-source-level efforts.

It feels like this is another Google minus the Tier 1 brand name, the high bar of talent, the open-source projects, and the deep engineering work that often gets done at a system level.

For plain vanilla CRUD services, this level of oversight and micromanagement is just nuts and doesn’t bring the company much value in my opinion.

It doesn’t allow engineers to grow and comes across as extremely condescending and dismissive of previous experiences.

It’s a bizarrely run company with massively inefficient processes for already established and battle-tested processes at other banner tech companies.

At some point in time, you have to allow engineers to innovate. If everyone is working like a drone and leadership micromanages the hell out of them, why do you need to hire experienced engineers? At this time, the ecosystem is just process and bureaucracy hell. Radical changes need to happen to fix this.