Groupon

I worked at Groupon for about a year as a software engineer. My role was in a new team, and I relocated to Ireland to become one of the first members.

We built products that were internally facing, aiming to improve processes within the business, and some other components that were externally facing (affecting the global user-base).

Here are some of my experiences:

• The office setup is very nice. They provide free drinks and snacks and a free lunch once a week, which also involves an informal meeting/presentation of some topical issues. They have a nice terrace area (with wifi) which catches the sun and is protected from the wind. It can be pleasant to work or spend time there during the (short) Irish summer.

• So much re-invention of the wheel. There seems to be an active reluctance to use existing, tried-and-tested tools. Instead, hand-rolled, bespoke, and (as a result) buggy solutions are preferred. Multiple duplicate solutions for existing problems can be found throughout the company.

• They use a lot of Ruby. When other large-scale companies are turning away from this in favor of the JVM (mainly due to scaling issues), Groupon seems happy to keep going with Ruby. I've worked on Ruby projects before, and I've never seen it written the way they use it at Groupon.

• There exist some "colourful" characters on the engineering teams. Some of these people have loud voices and strong opinions; as such, these people have clout that they don't deserve. In reality, they just produce noise or are overbearingly pedantic; the end result is not good engineering. There have been cases of work having to be completely re-written as a result of being over-engineered and poorly tested.

• The on-call process is a bit dysfunctional. One of the engineers in particular is an "on-call hero," happily spending out-of-hours time on what are often really trivial issues or over-sensitive triggers. SLAs for services are often arbitrarily decided without any advance performance testing. There is nothing heroic about being needlessly woken up at 3 AM.

• The interview process is insane. Groupon has "bar-raisers" (similar to Amazon) that can effectively veto the recruitment of a candidate, even if that candidate has received otherwise great feedback from other interviewers. Reasons for vetoing might be because the candidate cannot do (or does not know about) something that they would never be expected to do in the role. The amount of false negatives must be very high. Also: "colourful" characters tend to select like-minded individuals, so the crazies-to-normals ratio is unusually high.

• QA is an afterthought. Where it exists, it is administered improperly and inefficiently. This is a combination of a company culture that does not understand or value QA, a lack of QA resources (many QA engineers have left), and the "colourful" characters of those that remain.

• The hierarchy would describe the engineering teams as "agile," following "best practice," employing "micro-services," and all the buzzwords. However, much like the pleasant facade of the office environment, from an engineering perspective, things aren't so pretty under the hood. It is a bit of a cargo cult: teams might have meetings standing up, but that doesn't make them agile. Headless chickens can move quickly, too.

In the end, I had to get out because I felt that my engineering abilities were diminishing as a result of working there. I hate being negative, but being honest overrides that.

Get on the same page and point in the same direction. Invest in QA. Stop letting engineers reinvent the wheel.