Roku

A good benefit while the stock is going up. After COVID, there is a need to productize properly, or all will go away.

All is homegrown, from people skills to technologies. So, your experience at Roku would not be valuable anywhere else.

The SDLC is way outdated; no companies now still use it. The half-waterfall approach, lack of quality requirements, and design specs have led to multiple rewrites.

The sad part with waterfall is that you would expect clean requirements and well-thought-out design. But, on the contrary, the design and requirements are made just for the next quarter to boost profit, all based on the fact it is a free service. Quality, security, and scalability are no constraints on the design. All works while it brings revenues. There are no engineering challenges, no structured design.

The direction does not follow any standards; all is homegrown and custom-made with custom-made techniques and technologies. So, you cannot use that experience somewhere else.

As a developer, you work on your tasks, not involved with the architecture or the big picture. You actually do not need to know what other developers are working on, even within your team. So, the developer exposure is minimal, there is nothing to learn, and no exciting projects to work on.

A Far East manager is okay to hire 20 direct reports from the Far East. A Jewish manager is okay to hire all Jewish reports. There is no diversity or variety of opinions because opinions and communications are not healthy for the organization; management does not promote it.

As a development manager, you would not have control of your team, or what they work on and where their time is spent. So, there is no proper estimation, and developers could work on useless features that get punted most of the time because "just trying it"....

On vacations, it is weird; you can and you cannot take vacation. You cannot take more than 2 weeks, so it is only made for US-only people.

Promote communications bottom-up and have structural communications, not each manager with his own empire, disconnected from other managers out of fear of losing reports because their projects lack value while other managers have interesting features.

Features should be designed end-to-end, not through silos of developers.