PhonePe

1. Tech stack is good. Dropwizard framework with polyglot persistence, including MariaDB, Aerospike, ElasticSearch, and HBase. Message queues like RabbitMQ and Kafka. Numerous internal Dropwizard bundles acting as a facade.

2. Money, yeah, you will get a lot depending on your previous salary and offers.

1. PIP culture. Guy who recommended me PhonePe saying it's so good is on PIP himself.

2. Young workforce mostly freshers, so ways of working are ad-hoc. Early joiners with 6-8 years of experience are Architect/Engineering Manager. No proper defined guidelines. Requirements can change frequently. They call it Agile

   .

3. Generally, people work on weekends and after office. Good to know this before joining.

4. My personal life has taken a bad hit here.

5. Everyone here is slogging off. Culture of doing things as fast as possible with no proper testing, maybe no QAs, no proper test cases, improper monitoring and alerting. Error handling? Yeah, we get a 500 message: "Something went wrong" majorly.

6. Work from office culture. WFH is strongly discouraged, which may be fine, but overworking with a work from office culture is worse.

7. People from Amazon making the culture worse. Culture has changed from OK to bad to worse.

8. Lot of ego and people do not respect each other. Every senior guy has 30-50 messages which they will never reply to. These guys will not suggest you what to do but will come later on saying you should have done it this way or give the reviews. Observed it cross-teams.

9. Oldies vs Newbies politics. They have inducted some mid-senior engineers whose presence has threatened people who have been working there for 2-3 years and have grown their influence. These people will try their best to sideline you, and as far as I have observed, they are successful in doing so. Very bad for mid-senior engineers. Don't bother to join.

10. Few people have too much power to screw you. You have to be in their good books. The entire org is people-oriented rather than being process-oriented, so it helps these people to do what they wish.

11. People don't tell you what work you have to do, what features they want, and all. They just need you to figure it out as they don't have time to look into things. Requirements are not detailed. Nobody works on requirements or anything. Just do it. Then do iterations as long as your lead is not satisfied.

12. Valuation has peaked in the near term, so don't think much appreciation in ESOPs for now. You get ESOPs which they may buy back a certain percentage, but you cannot liquidate them, so it's paper money.

13. No rating, no hierarchy, and hence no promotion.

14. No documentation, so you have a hard time understanding things.

15. Operating like a startup, so all the cons that come with a startup are here.

Bring in the process. Provide a goal plan for the year which managers never fill and give clarity to developers on what to do. The way culture is going on will only give short-term benefit, and it will be disastrous in the long run.