ServiceNow

Bill did well in brand building, with average perks. He was sales-oriented.

Engineering excellence is not only below expectation but terrible to a certain extent. Tech debt, poor documentation, and code quality, slow, unreliable, hard-to-use internal tools—especially the lab and code review tools—all lead to low productivity. Not many people really care; even the slightest UI improvement request goes nowhere. ServiceNow is the only workplace I've experienced where no one replies to your email, even if it's their own problem.

An untransparent and often biased performance review process. Only the manager has the say, and it depends on the relationship you have with your supervisor instead of the contribution and impact you've made.

Title inflation: Many so-called Staff or higher-level engineers are basically doing nothing practical. The most unprofessional engineer is one I came across in ServiceNow who still got promoted to Distinguished Engineer.

A fair amount of SWEs are internal transfers from different roles without proper software engineering experience before at all. Switching to Postgres won't solve all performance problems; design and code quality matter. One funny code example I encountered is a data structure that is iterated four times to parse data from, where it only needed to be iterated once. Expect all kinds of weird, silly stuff; anything can happen here.

Make internal tools work better for internal engineers. Recognize real talent and contribution.