PayPal

Nothing notable. I'd say the salad bar was decent at the office, but I don't really miss it. Despite the cons below, I'd still recommend the company because not all teams are alike. If you are lucky, you might end up in a good org with a good team.

1. Was typecast into a maintenance project, working on a legacy codebase. Because of parental leaves, I couldn't look for jobs outside. Despite expressing the need for more challenging work for two years, nothing was done.

2. Work-life balance: Imbalanced on-call support. I was made the primary on-call person for supporting a legacy app that was prone to frequent crashes. I wasn't given cycles to improve its tech stack or performance, just to keep supporting it until its deprecation.

3. Because of the above, there was no room for personal career growth or skillset upgrade.

4. Bad/basic parental policy. The managers treat you like you are going on vacation if you take parental leave.

5. Disgruntled old-time employees who liked being knowledge silos and hated sharing their knowledge unless coddled or getting a manager involved.

1. Invest in nurturing people as individuals, not a herd/headcount. This is applicable to most tech companies now. The lesson has been learned that no matter what new initiatives senior folks are coming up with, the stock price just ain't moving up. So why not be nice to employees and treat them well? It will probably pay off long-term!

2. There is more to a business than optics and extreme capitalism. Mandate some books on philosophy, kindness, and empathy to managers and above. Make them read, summarize, test on, and have team members rate them on those qualities.