Chewy

• Very relaxed dress code (shorts, t-shirts, flip flops).

• Chewy has a bunch of FANTASTIC engineers at the ground level, struggling with technical debt and poor decisions. These guys are the heart and soul of what is left of the old Chewy operating principles.

• If you're looking for a huge mess to clean up from the legacy days, this is the place for you (if you're into that kind of stuff).

• There is a huge migration to public cloud that should alleviate "on-prem" excuses that development teams crutch on. Migrating to public cloud has already exposed the lack of ownership and willingness to learn/adapt on a majority of application teams.

• Modern development languages are used (Kotlin, Scala, etc.). The mobile, pricing, and marketing teams are doing really awesome things.

Production outages are treated as blame games rather than constructive postmortems. Finger-pointing happens at the very top of our leadership structure. This must change.

There is no trust between leadership and engineers. Leadership will often make false claims based off phony data, then back down when engineering brings real data into the mix.

There is a severe lack of collaboration between teams. Many teams impose limitations on others due to the status quo. Innovation is not something that is promoted here; it's actually punished.

There is a severe lack of planning; everything is priority number one all the time. There are countless requests that get thrown at multiple teams at 4:59 PM Friday with a due date of 5:00 PM. This behavior is common and encouraged from leadership to "get things done".

We are unwilling to tackle technical debt (/etc/hosts lol). This is a pretty common thing at companies, but my personal worst encounter yet. Things are in a terrifying state with lots of ignorance and doubt around the cold hard facts about the infrastructure. It's truly astonishing that anything actually functions.

You've made a bad first impression on teams that are trying to bring Chewy forward, culturally and technically.

You should take a step back and observe the patterns, and if your motives are true, you'll see what's really going on in a matter of time.

Hopefully by then, it's not too late and you still have the good guys on your side.

This company is going to change, willingly or by force. The ball is in your court as to which path you want to go.