GoDaddy

• Decent bonuses
• Good values & culture.
• Nice office perks.
• Unlimited PTO.

These were in my work area, no guarantees on existing systemically:

• Lack of office politics; focus and recognition are based on contribution.
• Excellent peers.
• Decent to good immediate managers.

"Raises" adjusted for inflation are yearly pay cuts.

Job security and loyalty seem to be a thing of the past. Extensive system knowledge and 9 years of working up through the ranks only to be dismissed in a mass reduction of force that surprised and demoralized my peers.

Left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing vibes. Mandates were passed from internal teams to product teams without any acknowledgement of incurred cost, such as increasing headcount to meet demands or changing the roadmap of product milestone dates. Some examples are CI/CD platform transitions, coding language transitions, data source transitions, metric reporting transitions, logging transitions, as well as frequent transitions of OS image, infrastructure versions, and detected vulnerabilities.

Product teams that take internal requirements seriously (like the one I was on) are overwhelmed by the effort delegated to them, and there is a good chance the product teams that are able to perform well are ignoring many internal requirements.

Schizophrenic product decisions. Create a product to design, then switch to a new streamlined product that was never intended to see use, then abandon the first product to create a nearly identical product. Customer feedback is solicited, then ignored, severely limiting the value of the product.

I concede I could be missing data driving these decisions, but as an engineer, it feels bad when your hard work is wasted by decisions above your pay grade.

Product teams can't do an effective job at creating products when leadership frequently changes their mind about what they want. Commit to doing a product right, even if it takes revision, instead of recreating a similar product four times.

Infrastructure/security teams are delegating large amounts of mandated work. Each mandate should be driven to completion by the internal team responsible, including far more interaction, support, and follow-up when delegating. This should also include a centralized, measured accounting (across all mandates) of cost to each team. The current system of some upfront work to support mandates, handing off, and following up after deadlines has allowed these demands of effort to balloon to levels I think would surprise leadership.