LinkedIn

Decent compensation (until you cliff). Good health insurance and 401k match. Good additional benefits (i.e., $2000 per year PerkUP money that can be spent on childcare or cleaning, among other things). Two weeks of company-wide shutdown per year, plus "inDays" (monthly). Smart and competent engineers on the teams. No significant push for RTO for engineers as of now.

• Very limited salary growth past year, no stock refreshers past year, layoffs just happened. Probably no salary growth or refreshers for some time going forward. Be glad you were not laid off.
• Severely stifled career growth (promotions under increased scrutiny, even if you get promoted, the package will be less generous; management promotions highly unlikely).
• Outdated and ineffective technical stack.
• Lots of in-house solutions, which are miles behind industry-standard ones.
• Your experience here becomes not easily transferable.
• No clear vision for improving the situation (still building new in-house solutions with decreased team sizes).
• As a result of the vision issues, lots of "high-priority" projects are initiated by leadership with questionable goals (not solving the actual problem, or solving it in a most rigid and inconvenient way possible with outdated concepts or tools).
• Significant amount of bureaucracy. Hence, the speed of change is slow. Hence, mentioned projects arrive (if they even arrive) too late and are outdated on arrival.
• Unlimited PTO (so they do not have to pay you for the days of PTO remaining when you leave. Statistically, people tend to go to PTO less with unlimited PTO).
• Recent wind down of benefits (not significant yet, but the tendency is there and aligns with other cost-cutting measures).

TLDR: Feels like it's past its prime, and now the trajectory is only down. It remains to be seen if the trend can be changed.

Acknowledge that industry standards exist for a reason. You are not Meta or Google in terms of resources to write your own stacks, and your Kafka situation will probably not repeat itself. Start using industry standard tools instead of trying to reinvent the wheel.