Klarna

Engineering-wise, all the tools you need are available, and the technical part of the job is smooth because the infrastructure is extremely solid. There are some amazing and talented people who keep everything working at an incredible scale, and these engineers deserve a lot of praise.

Work-life balance is actually good. Very rarely, if ever, were there expectations for you to work past 5pm.

Until the end of 2023, the company was a very exciting place to be, with lots of events and internal initiatives. It seems management got addicted to the revenue that they got from "going lean" during the 2022 rough patches, and it became a lot more micromanaging.

They took away all the autonomy from individual teams, and now all decisions are made from stakeholders three or more levels above you, and their decision is basically always final. What was once exciting became a job where you just gotta do what you're told, and if you have any opinion about your product or feature, it doesn't really matter.

On top of that, career progression seemed very difficult to achieve. They request that you check boxes in order to be promoted to senior, but often times there are no opportunities to take action and make the decisions that will allow for the promotion. On top of that, there's very little wiggle room within a team's budget to promote all the engineers who deserve it. Pay was a bit below the industry standard as well.

Micromanaging and interfering with inner team dynamics for the sake of surveillance is very damaging to employees' morale. Learn what makes teams work the best way they can and let them do their thing.