Glean

The product is very good overall, and has a very good foundation technically.

It looks modern, has good features, and does its job well.

Early people were clearly very good at what they were doing, since I feel some of those early decisions are what's keeping things going somewhat smoothly.

There are a lot of interesting problems to work on that will help you with growth (though not all people get to work on these).

I feel like there’s good behavior on design docs, and experienced people will give you really good feedback. This fosters a place where you don’t just get spoon-fed the answer and actually have to solve problems for yourself.

Velocity for adding new features is amazing, and I think this brings a lot of value to our customers.

Time off has become a joke. Previously, it was unlimited; now, they still advertise it as such, but it's a hard 15 days. After that, you need a really, really, really good reason to take more. When they added time off tracking, they pretended it was just for more information, but it has become quite strict. Leadership keeps making decisions in private, then just doing internal PR moves about the decision, pretending it's still up for discussion. They move forward with it even if very few people agree. When there's any dissent, they publicly stop it. Work-culture-wise, the company is in a very scary place. If you own even a semi-important product, you'll be bombarded with questions. These are questions that are easily found if you use our own product that we're building. If we're not using it, who will?

Work-life balance has gone downhill to the point where if you mute your Slack during the weekend, your first part of Monday is answering all the questions people DM'd you on Slack. Benefits are sub-mediocre, same with holiday time off. They never add new holidays; they just juggle them around, swapping one for the other. The quality of new software engineers has gone downhill, probably because the onboarding is very bad. This is a bit scary since it might cause bigger issues later on. It might also be because hiring has shifted from "everyone needs to agree" to higher-ups pushing people through the process. Lots of our fixes are now just bandaids to problems people have added. The number of 'urgent' cherry picks every release is hilariously large.

Stop trying to pretend things are all good and amazing. Stop making secret decisions while proclaiming the company values transparency.