Indeed

The product is pretty useful, and the work/life balance is okay. Some teams are remote, which is nice.

Technical management, at least in my experience, doesn't know what they're doing. I honestly don't understand the purpose of dev managers who don't know how to code.

If your experience is like mine, expect your DM to make you do their job. Resource planning and meeting organization are all ad hoc and delegated. DMs are glorified performance reviewers, and it's pretty clear they're being directed to squeeze performance reviews to find excuses to fire or hold back good engineers to avoid more layoffs, like all the big tech companies.

Meanwhile, the tech stack is a mess. It's honestly baffling in 2024. It's something I would have considered obsolete in 2014.

There's no time for tech debt, though, because management is so bad at managing projects that everyone is just working on experimental projects that are desperately guessing at ways to improve UX. The vast majority of which fail, wasting months of work.

That makes sense for Google, who basically admitted 10 years ago that they'd peaked. Every app does eventually.

But you shouldn't hire for growth if you aren't growing.

Hire real dev managers, or just don't bother, if you're going to have engineers do their job. Don't pay a "manager" a fancy salary to do performance reviews all day.

Project management is not a bad word. PMs have given me far more efficiency in my career than DMs ever did.