DraftKings

• Brand recognition when you tell people where you work.
• Easier interview than MAANG.
• People are generally good.
• Benefits were above average.
• Pay, when you consider equity, is great unless you were hired when the stock was sky high.

Engineering decision-making is almost completely in the hands of people who have just been there forever and have not kept up with technology.

Legacy code is everywhere. They hired new grads in the beginning, and you can tell.

They do not value technical aptitude. Rather than optimize code, they will spend a fortune on AWS to compensate for poor performance.

Architecture team is elitist and not nearly as talented as they think; they force their poorly written middleware on the entire company.

New CTO is dubiously qualified and focused on cutting costs over people.

Entire leadership is obsessed with profit, with shareholders as the priority over ethics and loyalty.

Few, if any, RSU refreshers now, so on year 5, compensation will nosedive. They replaced it with an ESPP, lol.

Impossible to get promoted for real; they will put you in a higher role but not change your title or your pay. If you want to get promoted, there is an extreme approval process that involves your manager and team making the case to promote you to a leadership panel, and you are expected to have been doing the job you want to be promoted to for over a year.

Recently has begun "silent layoffs," terminating higher earners for "performance" out of nowhere.

When they fire people, they ambush the shocked employee, especially if the termination reason is pretextual. I have been talking to senior technical employees on Slack only to see them marked "Deactivated" in the middle of the day, mid-conversation. I also noted that management didn't discuss it with the team.

On that note, people who joined the company advanced WAY too fast when it was a startup, so you have a lot of bad managers and directors that got their role by default, and they never leave and have job security no matter how badly they perform.

Oddly, half of the company is located in Bulgaria, including the team that handles a lot of PaaS and DevOps, so if you need those types, and you will, good luck getting help on that. My team just said f*ck it and learned to do our own DevOps.

DBAs are understaffed and asked to do things above their skillset, which has led to some performance issues and unreliable, non-ACID compliance despite AWS hosting.

Again, legacy code and poor code quality/standards universally.

Critical onboarding information is not documented anywhere but retained by long-term employees in "tribal knowledge."

Don't become evil like you appear to be doing.