Software Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: Good culture around taking responsibility for your work, while having a no-blame attitude for major problems, like "incidents". If you can find the right team that matches what you want, you'll thrive. Otherwise, you may struggle with bureaucracy.
Cons: Comp reviews are done without any input from the employee. Performance reviews, decoupled from compensation, don't feel impactful. On a scale from 1-5 where 5 is beyond expectations, 5 isn't actually an option because the higher-ups don't want those to be given out.
In fact, a lot of decisions from higher-ups impact the culture negatively. They make decisions that are better handled by team leads and managers (people regular employees actually work with, talk to, and know).
The theme of management is having a lax policy, then slowly killing it without clarity or communication. Promotions also happen without employee input.
Hybrid policy, which used to be unclear, is now mandated from above and tracked by badge swipes. "Unlimited" PTO is not so anymore. In the US, it is tracked to be no more than some "average" they got of 15-25 days, up to manager discretion, but after 25, they're told to decline additional.
KPIs are made just to satisfy executives that don't have the best context for the teams that have to write them.
Almost a third of the team I'm on are managers of some sort.