Meta

• Surprisingly good WLB as an SDE 1 in an internal tools team.
• Benefits and wellness reimbursement.
• Delicious free food (breakfast, lunch, and dinner).
• Some brilliant people and really cool engineering, like the source control interface and devserver reservations.
• Very friendly colleagues.
• Compensation if joining at the right time.

A lot of times "impact" culture just kills good engineering, in my opinion. Short-term impact is so prioritized over everything else that it tends to blind people into what actually matters and therefore make poor product decisions.

Also, frequently it's more important to improve the visibility of your work and sell its impact than the quality and purpose of the work itself.

• Dreadful performance review process
• Performance axis to fulfill: engineers need to have (mostly nonsense) non-engineering contributions in order for them to meet expectations
• Compensation if joined at the wrong time (stock crash)
• SDE 1 and 2 levels are not terminal, so there is pressure to get promoted within a certain timeline, otherwise PIP.