Salesforce

The insane growth in Pardot is pretty incredible. The company provides inside details on revenue specifics, which gives you confidence in its decisions.

Despite hiring so many people, they still invest quite a bit of the budget into its employees. Did someone say perks? Yeah, they're still there and even better than before.

The growth has made Pardot lose that tight culture it once had.

Previously, everyone would say "hi" to everyone and make a chance to learn everyone's names. Now, there's a ridiculous amount of people and cliques have formed. You can't really fault the company for this; that's on the employees.

From an engineering perspective, Pardot is inherently stuck on this giant monolithic legacy codebase. When you hire 5 new engineers each week, there are the same exact questions because no one can even Google the answer, given how old the majority of the tech stack is.

There have been efforts to split this out into microservices, but decisions are often made by engineering managers and tech leads who have been dispositioned into enterprise-related solutions that are often dated for the modern web and just not fun to work with. You can't blame them too much for this; product managers are breathing down their necks constantly.

More often than not, these early decisions aren't well thought out and lead to projects getting scrapped 6 months later or resulting in a significant redesign.

Annoyingly, too, is that Pardot has a concept of "hack days" to work on whatever you want. This used to be an engineering fun event, and solutions that made a better coding experience would often win. Since the T&P (Technology and Product) lingo started evolving, the only thing that wins is something that can sell something.

Seek out advice from your engineers. They are the ones building the project; let them have a say in this if you want them to enjoy what they are working on.

Make programming fun again.