Rapid7

• I've been fortunate as my career advancement has been comparatively quick, however this is not the case for most people who have been in a similar position to me, however if you rapidly claim ownership of key areas and are willing to constantly work above your grade (and have good manager representation) there is still the ability to progress

• I may be biased as I have been working here for a while but there are still good people working in Belfast

• A dwindling number of long serving staff are left and although they are being ground down you can still see their care and investment come through in their work

• Still get free drinks and snacks in the office

Walking into the office can feel like walking into a morgue, been working here for a long time and have never seen less enthusiasm or camaraderie on a day-to-day basis. The idea of office culture or company culture in the way it used to be is dead.

The expectations from new vs old engineering staff is very off. How senior you are doesn't matter, if you've worked there for a while everything will be made your responsibility, brought into a lot of high importance escalations and responses, despite the fact that we have multiple engineers more senior, in better locations (where it isn't 1am) who should be helping. This would be fine if over time responsibilities were more evenly spread. But instead management will pile on more work so you'll be expected to just constantly handle emergencies to give other people space for those new projects.

Upper management (SVP, C-Level) consistently bypasses engineering management and order engineers (junior engineers) to try and get them to do their own pet projects. This is consistently said to be "a rare occasion" but a couple of times a month isn't uncommon. It just highlights the low quality of a lot of the upper management that they would bypass their own structures so frequently instead of putting in the work to fix them.

Salary for Belfast is now lagging behind the good companies in Belfast by quite a bit especially considering the 3 day in office requirement. It's not uncommon for seniors in other companies to earn more than a staff here. Although the salary is still great in comparison to other industries so seems a bit self-absorbed to complain.

Management refuses to acknowledge that they have very limited experienced staff to onboard, so when they hire 4 contractors per experienced member of staff they immediately blame individual contributors for being the bottleneck

Delivery is getting slower and slower and slower, there is a crippling fear of doing anything new as it could cause breaks.

Seems to be no consequences for underperforming especially in low level management. It's rare to talk to a manager hired recently (3 years ago or sooner) that can explain anything beyond the basics of the area they are responsible for

Enthusiastic staff are thrown into the meat grinder of mediocre dev and management and ground down until they are jaded or leave. I desperately try to insulate my good junior devs from this but all I have managed so far is to slow it down

Newer staff are typically allocated to more interesting discovery based work as it "doesn't require as much knowledge of old code" this is after years of documentation and onboarding improvements and continues years after new staff enter the company. If you put time into learning some of the ancient systems you are unlikely to develop any new technical skills.

No ability for engineers to officially develop management skills anymore, you have to choose management or IC, no hybrid position left

Major issues that end up being business critical are not invested in and are instead passed around management like a timebomb. The unlucky team that ends up holding it last gets a month or two to understand a big issue, and solve it, whilst also continuing their planned work. Typically at implicit threat of their comp/promotion depending on it

Work/Life balance is a joke, director+ can quite frequently get frustrated if you aren't available well after standard working hours. This is fine occasionally but when you end up working into the AM about 3/4 times a month on average, often on work you were not involved with at all, it gets draining fast. Especially when all of your senior management chain seems to disappear or just respond on Slack on mobile while they get to enjoy time with their families while you don't.

No budget for personal dev

No budget for travel

No budget for conventions

No budget for hardware that is often necessary for effectively carrying out the job

Increasingly restrictive policies are understandable as the company grows however the lack of transparency and clear timelines makes engineering make constant adjustments to workflows with no notice

The majority of engineers I would have considered "excellent" are now either senior enough that they are all in the corporate sphere of no longer actually delivering or they left

The interview process for engineering interns is more selective than the one for staff engineer+, if you are trying to maintain standards in interviews you will be asked not to do them or you will be avoided by recruitment

It seems clear the choices are deliberate and measured from a management perspective, so any advice is not really relevant as the areas I perceive as negative seem to be what you want.

A couple of years ago it was said that "we don't want to accept the mediocrity of other big software companies so we have to change". Well in good news you did change the company, for the worse, and we are still the same as the mediocre big software companies.