I get to work with smart, conscientious people. The compensation is very good, and I think the core product is quite good (there's a reason people pay for it).
I enjoy most days at work, despite my complaints below.
Virtually every developer at Datadog shudders when they hear the word "Bazel". Our approach to developer experience is so, so, broken.
There's an expectation that people should build new products in (one of the several) large monorepos, but actually getting things done in those repos is brutally slow. Just launching or testing your backend service involves waiting ages for Bazel to compile a ton of unrelated code.
On top of that, we have to use a lot of bad, underdocumented, proprietary developer tooling. If you want to spin up a new REST service/Postgres instance/whatever, expect everything to take 5-10x more effort and time than it would elsewhere. You will spend more of your time learning how to do things the some-internal-team way than actually solving business problems. Edit-compile-run loops are often an order of magnitude slower than they would be at other companies.
This mess is sometimes kind of interesting, but it is definitely not a good way to spend software developers' time.
Pay more attention to developer experience. It's so broken, and the people doing surveys about it are not asking the right questions.
On-site interview (flew from West Coast). The interview was pretty straightforward. They sent me away with a homework assignment, due within 24 hours. I implemented a functional, well-documented solution. They came back with a few edit requests, w
Coding Screen and Final Loop (Coding, System Design, Behavioral, Tech Experiences) Recruiters and Coding/System Design interviewers were very friendly, knowledgeable, and respectful. Unfortunately, I did not have positive experiences with the remain
If a recruiter reaches out, you schedule a recruiter screen. Then, schedule a technical screening. They have many open roles, so there's no urgency to schedule the technical. You can take a comfortable time gap to prepare. The interviewer was frien
On-site interview (flew from West Coast). The interview was pretty straightforward. They sent me away with a homework assignment, due within 24 hours. I implemented a functional, well-documented solution. They came back with a few edit requests, w
Coding Screen and Final Loop (Coding, System Design, Behavioral, Tech Experiences) Recruiters and Coding/System Design interviewers were very friendly, knowledgeable, and respectful. Unfortunately, I did not have positive experiences with the remain
If a recruiter reaches out, you schedule a recruiter screen. Then, schedule a technical screening. They have many open roles, so there's no urgency to schedule the technical. You can take a comfortable time gap to prepare. The interviewer was frien