Grab

The pay is genuinely top of the market, which is probably the main reason people stick around as long as they do.

There are friendly and supportive colleagues.

Workload and constant anxiety: From the C-suite to middle management, there’s an unspoken expectation to work overtime and squeeze every last drop out of you until you snap. Half the daily grind isn’t actually spent building meaningful stuff—it’s just managing the anxiety of the managers above you.

Bureaucracy over progress: Lately, there’s been an explosion of extra check-ins, endless reporting, and useless paperwork just to track progress. Frontline workers end up spending more time managing management's nerves than getting real work done.

Incompetent leadership strategy: The shift from actual execution to pointless reporting comes down to manager incompetency. Much of the daily work feels completely useless. It’s like a grocery store asking its clerks to rearrange the shelves over and over again while the business goes down the drain.

Fake stance on mental health: The company pushes the responsibility of mental health entirely onto individual employees while keeping business-as-usual operations going. The unwritten message is that your mental well-being is your own problem and you should deal with your own stuff. Burnout here isn't just standard fatigue; it’s actual depression caused by the environment.

Fragile leadership and ignored feedback: Any feedback or criticism that the leadership doesn't like gets labeled as toxicity or negativity, mostly driven by massive leadership egos. Employee survey (Pulse Check) scores have been plummeting for years, but nobody at the top bats an eyelid. The implicit attitude from the exco is that they pay you top-of-market, so you should shut up, conform, or leave. A fun fact is that town hall Q&As used to be anonymous, but leadership stripped that away and forced names onto questions because they decided uncomfortable questions are toxic and negative.

Toxic workplace politics: Management is packed with Machiavellian types who treat employees as disposable gears in a machine.

Passive-aggressive communication: Senior management sent emails asking questions like why a feature wasn't rolled out three months ago—not to actually understand the reason, but to vent frustration and try to publicly shame someone. A fun fact is that nobody even replied to those emails because everyone is too terrified. You should just say what you actually mean instead of playing passive-aggressive mind games.

Culture of fear and unspoken punishment: The company claims to have a no-punishment culture for mistakes, but postmortem meetings tell a completely different story. Teams get publicly roasted and ripped apart during presentations, which breeds a massive fear of messing up. Every time an outage occurs, management’s reaction is just to demand more postmortems as a middle management's subtle way to punish and intimidate the people who made the mistake.

The senior management won't listen, as their ego is way too bloated.

Be direct and authentic: If you’re unhappy with a timeline or a rollout speed, just say so directly. Stop sending passive-aggressive emails expecting people to read between the lines.

Fix systemic issues, don't just shift blame: Address workplace stress at an organizational level rather than telling employees to handle burnout on their own time.

Listen to Pulse Check feedback: Dropping scores over multiple years aren't just "negativity" - they are a warning sign. Throwing high pay at people won't fix a fundamentally broken and fear-driven work culture.

Clean house on serial paper-pushing managers: Fire the "career managers" who jump from company to company without holding any actual technical or domain know-how. Their hands-on skills are completely outdated, so they can't get real work done—they just hide behind endless paperwork, daily check-ins, and postmortem demands. Replace them with leaders who have actual hands-on competence and know how things are built.