Grubhub

• Unlimited PTO
• $50 weekly Grubhub money that you can use to order Grubhub anywhere since COVID started.
• Good work/life balance
• Interesting problems to solve
• Management attempts at diversity and inclusion.

Before COVID:

• Office, culture, and coworkers
• Lunch catering and work events
• Monthly enterprise town halls that gave a sense of purpose to the Enterprise team.

Grubhub is becoming more bureaucratic and dysfunctional every day.

Grubhub as a whole is a very top-down chain of command company. While I assume this can work for some companies that have a clear vision, it doesn't for Grubhub.

Most of the higher management and product team tries to catch up with our competitors instead of coming up with new ideas. Because of that, initiatives can be half-baked and not researched. At the same time, big ideas from the engineering teams usually die by a thousand cuts of bureaucracy, since they need to convince a lot of people before the idea even reaches out to the higher-ups.

This bureaucracy is worsened by the number of people that are in "management" or decision-making positions, while none of them have any willpower or sometimes real power to actually make any decisions.

In addition, as I have been here longer, I realized that it is very hard for people to advance in their career. A lot of times, politics are a more important factor than competence.

Since I have been here, most of the management stayed the same. While some of them are good managers, there are some that are not. I have noticed that not-so-great managers are usually the ones that use office politics more and more to gain more power and push aside competition in their ranks or even other managers.

That being said, the company recently introduced a leveling guide that, on paper, should allow career advancement. However, execution on that remains to be seen.

The last thing that can be improved is the company's HR practices.

Year-end reviews and compensation adjustment timelines don't make sense. Compensation adjustments happen before year-end reviews. Because of that, it doesn't matter if you feel like the year-end review was unjust or even if, as the result of the conversation during your year-end review, your manager changes his/her mind about you. By that point, things are mostly set, and it is too late to change anything.

It would also be good to be able to review your manager.

There is also a lot of talk about "inclusion," but in reality, it just translates to some corporate HR video about it and nothing else in practice (given even that is better than nothing).

Ask yourself, where would you see the company being in 2 years, and where would you see the competition in 2 years?

Is Grubhub going to be able to compete with the competition using its current processes and systems?

Also, a re-evaluation of HR practices and the decision-making process within the company could be helpful.