Snap

Great pay. Lots of freedom. Their heart is in the right place.

Systemic myopia and delusion.

Long hours for those who are unable to enforce their own work-life boundaries.

Lack of emphasis on execution excellence.

You send out emails with platitudes about work-life balance, which is great, but also very out of touch with what is actually happening in the organization.

I regularly see my coworkers working well into the night – often 1-3 AM (yes, you read that right, and it’s not because they are getting in after 10).

Your director-level managers are disconnected from the realities on the ground, and iOS engineers in particular are far too eager to just hack solutions in place as a result, which only causes development to slow and worsens the problem.

In meetings with Evan, people become “yes-men”. Evan, you need to rein in some of your iOS ambitions, and you need to make sure there is time for tech-debt paydown.

Android got this with Mushroom but at the cost of lots of overtime on the Android side. There is a better way.

Involve engineering (real engineers who actually contribute to the codebase) in product discussions earlier for the sake of coming up with sane timelines.

Do not allow arbitrary deadlines to put us in a situation where something is rushed out into beta and then takes forever to ship because initial time pressure produced a garbage product.

Emphasize and reward execution excellence, not just speed of execution.

It is morally questionable to have someone working 12+ hours a day and ask them to do more.

Engineers, especially junior engineers, should not have to be the ones to push back on management and PMs. Your managers and PMs aren’t doing their job of giving you a clear picture of what is actually happening; it’s all roses, but I’m pretty sure you’re smart and can read between the lines when it’s the same story with every major feature launch.