Marqeta

In my personal experience:

• There are many intelligent, passionate, and wonderfully collaborative people at the individual team level.
• Generally flexible work schedules.
• Total compensation is perhaps not competitive with top tech companies but it's ok.
• Core culture and values are great, and most people actually seem to demonstrate them.
• A lot of very interesting problems to solve on platform and product levels.

• Upper leadership (Senior Director +) seems to be a mess. High turnover. Constant priority shifting. Some circling back to the same priorities over and over because they didn't care to understand the landscape before charging ahead. "This time will be different" with each iteration, while things essentially stay the same, because they all seem to severely underestimate the work involved to resolve the main issues.
• Significant tech debt to pay down with key systems - with no significant investment in headcount to improve them. Progress is being made, but slowly due to teams being understaffed and overwhelmed. Essential teams have backlogs that keep growing because they can't keep up.
• Endless visibility initiatives. Upper leaders want more metrics, better metrics, comprehensive summaries, dashboards etc. Providing detailed visibility at desired layers can often take a lot more work than you think, and it's taking away from other essential development work.
• A few leaders seem to think AI will fix all the technical resource issues - but it doesn't.

Stop relying too heavily on dashboards, surveys, reports, and the words of other upper leaders to tell you what's going on. Make time to meet with your teams on the ground. Actually talk to them. Empathize with them. Meet in a more intimate team-focused setting (not just All Hands). Get their honest perspectives on the state of things and our direction without focusing too heavily on pushing the top-down initiatives in those settings.

I promise you'll learn a lot.