LinkedIn

Good food. A lot of time off. Good benefits.

When Jeff Weiner left the company, he took compassionate leadership with him. After Ryan took over, we were optimistic for a while, but the next thing you know, people who suck up to their bosses get promoted to senior management. Engineers who squeeze the last drop of creativity every day out of themselves get promoted to managers, and now they start squeezing the last drop of creativity every day out of everyone they manage.

There is no more compassion in the leadership, although they still pretend there is. To be specific:

• Work gets scheduled with 5-day work weeks in mind, even though we get many Fridays off. So, what do we do? We work on days off to get the work done. Newer engineers are worked to the bone without promotions, refreshes, or any learning opportunities to improve themselves. Senior engineers are occupied too and aren't willing to help guide new members.

• Bait and switch. When interviewing candidates, LinkedIn still leads them to believe there's good work-life balance here. But when they enter the company, they're confronted with a completely different reality.

• Less pay, but with good excuses. LinkedIn offers a slightly bigger package than many other companies upfront, but there's typically no annual refreshes. And they think this is okay because there's better "work-life balance" (there's not). There are rumors going around about people getting annual refreshes for doing good work. I haven't seen one in person.

• The tech stack is very old and poorly documented. You're also not expected to find much help from other engineers. You're on your own. Good luck.

• New feature development is pointless. I only use LinkedIn to find jobs. Who cares about other features? Somehow we have hundreds of new features under development at any given time (many of them will be deprecated in a year or two, after their product leads get a promotion). There is no meaning in the work.

Think about whether we really need all the features we currently have and the ones we are developing. Our revenues are not higher because of this. Cut some of this down. Let engineers have a better command of their time, which they can spend on their own learning, and you wouldn't have someone dedicated to talking about well-being and burnout every other week.