DraftKings

PROS:

• Relatively competitive compensation
• Great benefits package, including "unlimited PTO" (never had problems with requesting time off)
• Modern tech stack, so can work with relatively new tech
• Adequate opportunity to grow and get promoted relatively quickly
• Helpful, bright coworkers who are willing to lend you a hand (more collaborative than competitive)

NEUTRALS:

• East Coast culture/vibe as most engineers are based in Boston (expect people to be blunt with you; don't expect to be coddled)
• Time-sensitive work surrounding American sports events, particularly NFL
• Urgent projects concerning product launches in new states (states are gradually legalizing DK's products, and DK has to make sure to stay in compliance with each state's own laws)
• Currently open to hybrid and remote work, although they're encouraging return-to-office and stopped work-from-home stipends in 2023
• Moral concern working in the gambling industry? For what it's worth, DK has a "responsible gaming" department that provides tools & resources to discourage gambling addiction (ex. limits on how much you can gamble)

CONS:

• Founded in 2012, still has the mindset of a start-up despite growing fairly large (very few support teams like QA/testing, DevOps, support, etc.; instead, each developer has all those responsibilities)
• No formal onboarding or training
• Documentation is lacking
• Deployment/release process is manual and prone to mistakes
• Executives prioritize cutting costs over workflow improvements (actually downgraded some services)
• Cybersecurity (see below)
• On-call rotation (see below)

CYBERSECURITY (con):

• Executives over-prioritize ease-of-use over security
• Executives over-prioritize quantity of code released over quality of code released (prefer to release relatively fast even if something breaks and requires a patch or rollback)
• No standalone cybersecurity team or department, and no standardized security-related checklist or requirements for teams to follow
• Embarrassing, inexcusable credential stuffing attack and data breach in November 2022
• Executives aren't too phased by security threats (DK is no stranger to lawsuits)

ON-CALL ROTATION (con):

• Team-dependent, but usually everyone on the rotation has weeklong shifts
• If it's your week to be on-call, you have 24/7 responsibility to respond to and resolve pages in 10-15 minutes (otherwise it gets escalated, usually to your manager)
• Your recruiter will probably tell you that it's no big deal and that you'll rarely get paged. Wrong. This is not a formality or anything; this is a significant 24/7 responsibility.
• Again, depends on the team, but it's quite common to get paged outside of work hours, including the middle of the night (keep in mind that heavier traffic comes later in the evening and on the weekends in line with sports games)
• On-call ramps up for the NFL, especially the start of the season as well as the end (the Super Bowl is the biggest day, so, even if it's not your shift, your Super Bowl party may get replaced with a team on-call "party")
• For some NFL games (at least the first 4 weeks), if you're on-call, you're actually on a live call whenever there's a game on (Sundays as well as Thursday & Monday nights), including buffers before and after the game, monitoring dashboards the whole time
• Some engineers are really passionate about the work and don't mind on-call too much, but if you are looking for a stronger work-life balance like me, I recommend looking for opportunities with fewer or no on-call responsibilities (if you're in development, look around; DK's on-call is not industry standard)

The CTO needs to actually listen to the engineers. The heavy demands of, and lack of compensation for, on-call are constant callouts that go ignored, as well as better support for remote work. You're too big of a company to still have the mindset of a startup. Invest in QA/testing and cybersecurity instead of offloading an unsustainable amount of responsibility on developers.