Discover Financial

The culture at Discover is pretty laid back, and the benefits are really good.

• 25 days PTO starting
• Generous 5% 401k match
• Reasonable WFH options even before the pandemic.

The pay is well below average for engineers of all levels.

Promotions have been frozen for over a year now, despite all-time high revenue and stock prices. Leadership has indicated that promotions will remain frozen at least through 2021. A lot of good talent is leaving because of this.

The amount of red tape required to get anything done is overwhelming. There is also a serious lack of documentation. Teams get reorganized so often that finding out who owns or even knows about a specific application or service will consume the majority of your time. The amount of time you'll actually get to spend building software is minuscule.

Every couple of years, there will be an exciting new initiative from leadership to totally improve the way we work. But despite all of the inspiring speeches at town hall events, the plans don't come to fruition before they change their mind to chase the next big thing.

Enable your engineers to experiment more and reward creativity. Despite all of the talk of innovation, there is little room to improve anything that wasn't planned by business months in advance.