MongoDB

I started working at Mongo full-time as my first real job after a great internship experience. At first, it seemed too good to be true.

The campus team was determined to make sure I was happy and worked really hard to get me rotating on teams that were interesting to me.

Getting to work on my current team full-time was a dream come true, at first. There were interesting problems to solve, smart people to work with, and a mission that I cared about.

Obviously, by the title of this review, things have deteriorated since.

Despite the mostly nice people and all the things I've learned, the culture and environment have had a tremendously negative impact on me mentally and emotionally.

It's honestly been devastating watching this job morph from something that built my self-confidence into something that mostly brings me stress and heartache.

I'll get into this more in the cons section, but there are still some things that I recognize have been pros:

• Great benefits
• Pay keeps up with the cost of living in NYC
• At the lower/less senior levels, lots of kind and genuine people
• Internship program was an amazing opportunity
• Lots of interesting problems that need engineering effort to solve
• Culture that generally encourages employees to speak their minds (although there is no guarantee it will change anything)
• Employees strongly encouraged to regularly take time off
• As an engineer, lots of chances to be a mentor or receive mentorship

As I said, my dream job has become a nightmare. I never expected that I would experience so much volatility during my first job, a time where I should be focusing on improving my skills, not caught up in worry over the latest drama. I've changed managers 4 times without ever changing teams, and hardly anyone is left from the original team I joined. I've seen firsthand the way a toxic culture transforms people for the worse and breaks them down until they feel their only option is to leave.

It's the classic metaphor of a frog in a boiling pot of water; the transformation has been gradual enough that I can only look back and wonder how I ended up in a position where I'm upset all the time and apathetic about the future. There's so much to unpack, but to briefly summarize the cons:

• Extreme volatility and high turnover in certain departments (such as my own)
• Generally, HR exists to protect the company, not to support employees. I mostly felt that trying to improve things by engaging with my HRBP was a drain of time that could otherwise be spent improving my professional skills.
• Top-down management style and toxic culture that hasn't changed significantly despite repeated employee complaints in my department
• High potential for burnout as the culture drains you mentally and emotionally
• Lack of developer autonomy when a decision is made unilaterally at the top

I know someone from the company is going to reply to this and encourage me to reach out to the employee experience team. I want to make it clear that I did in fact do that a while ago when it was suggested by my HRBP, and it was one of the most negative experiences I've ever had with an HR representative. It did not make me feel heard or improve my outlook.

Working with HR in general has not been helpful. Even when one of my colleagues contacted our HRBP to say she was worried about how the team environment was impacting me, not a single person from HR reached out to check in on how I was doing. As much as I do believe that people have the capacity to grow and change, a corporation is not a person, and I am incredibly skeptical that these conditions will improve.

Provide extensive leadership training to anyone in a people management role. Make it proactive (a requirement to be a leader), not reactive (mandatory training after someone has already caused harm).

Overhaul the HR system so that leaders and their reports have the same HRBP.

Hire more HR professionals; one for an entire department of 100+ people is not enough.

Monitor for teams that have extremely high rates of attrition and for employees who are constantly being shifted around the reporting structure; use that as an HR red flag.

I want to make it clear that I have suggested all of these things in one way or another in various conversations with my team lead, engineering director, HRBP, and even the CTO. I highly doubt any of those suggestions were truly heard or applied.