Instacart

Free food at a high price

The company is data-driven, which translates to them not really caring about people.

I worked at Instacart as a senior data engineer and observed the following:

• Managers manage people by fear, constant pestering, and micromanaging. I had never seen a company where people are afraid of managers to the extent that they can't even joke around them until I came to Instacart.
• Managers hold supreme power, and the company works in very shady ways, like firing employees before they reach their one-year anniversary so that people never get the options they were promised.
• Upper management makes a big show of engineers going above and beyond each week rather than figuring out why people have to go above and beyond each week. The culture is broken.
• There is no training or proper leadership. When things fail, "RCAs" are created under the guise of documenting failures, but they are nothing more than finger-pointing and finding someone to blame.
• For major failures, the first thing managers ask their teams to do is figure out how much of the blame lies on their team. Once that is found, they proceed to find ways of not taking any blame.
• The on-call rotation was the worst. I spent 20 straight hours awake, monitoring constantly breaking processes for multiple teams, and was told that I was not meeting the Rubric standard for a senior engineer in month two of employment. I told them that the Rubric standard wouldn't be met after being asked to work for more than 15 hours.
• People are clinging to old, failed processes since the people who built these processes got too high up in the company, so their work is not questioned.
• Engineers are stressed beyond belief and are waiting to leave the company on their one-year anniversary if they can make it there at all.
• Long-term engineers show signs of mental breakdown from stress.
• I didn’t see one day where people were relaxed and smiling.

In conclusion, this company is not worth working for. This company is a stop-gap solution for retailers until they can ramp up their own delivery processes to compete with Whole Foods, just like Safeway and Target did.

Treat employees like humans, not data points.

Hire women in upper management who can sense the breakdown in culture.

Reward improvements as well as hard work.