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Dynamic environment with great learnings

Senior Software Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Grab for 4 years
December 4, 2021
Singapore, Singapore
4.0
RecommendsApproves of CEO
Pros
  1. Dynamic product: always evolving, with new verticals and ideas all the time.
  2. Good top-down culture: the CEO is a good man and instills good values.
  3. Lots of learning opportunities since it's a super app and the infrastructure is huge.
  4. Good CI, workflow clearly defined, and internal tools are decent.
  5. Developers can move across teams quite easily, and managers exercise flexibility.
  6. Appraisals are fairly carried out with objectivity (judged by the impact of work) and little play on politics.
Cons
  1. Some products are complex with rampant bugs.

  2. Engineers will do a shift (7 days) of on-call duties, usually once every month (which can be stressful).

  3. Projects are touched by many hands (people come and go), and code usually contains dead, deprecated, over-engineered, or hard-to-read/understand code. Engineers are often afraid to touch this code for fear of breaking it, which leads to points 1 and 2.

  4. Product managers command the direction, and there's a strong emphasis on profitability. Hence, things move very quickly in terms of wanting to create new features (that may not actually create impact, but the PM needs to show to the top they are innovating). Consequently, less emphasis is given on making code robust, which leads to points 1 and 2.

  5. Some engineers leave due to point 3, and it becomes a vicious cycle.

Advice to Management

New engineers are hired to cover the gaps due to poor code quality.

This increases cost and decreases profitability for the company.

My advice is to slow down and rebuild a solid foundation. When there are fewer on-call issues, engineers can use that time to build features that really matter.

Additional Ratings

Work/Life Balance
4.0
Culture and Values
4.0
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
5.0
Career Opportunities
5.0
Compensation and Benefits
4.0
Senior Management
4.0

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