Snap

Lottery ticket: may not be your favorite job, but it could be your last job!

You may create the seed of an idea that will take root in many other companies, even your competitors.

This place is crazy, crazy political (even to me, and I used to work in city government!). It's because incentives are all crazily misaligned in a myriad of ways.

The New York office is particularly egregious. Managers are also writing code, so it's my way or the highway, no discussion. You can do either one of these roles well, or you can do both poorly. Two same-named guys can't figure it out.

Senior management is quite inexperienced, so political bad actors rule the roost.

Teams are siloed from each other, very hard.

The tech is poor and immature. All we know how to do is use some open-source software or pay some service vendor. It's not interesting being done wrong. The politics keeps it from getting fixed.

There is no career progression, and I personally know several cases where people are not being treated correctly. As you can imagine, the personal growth and well-being of an individual will be the least of your directors', or managers', or managers' problems. That all takes a back seat to navigating the crazy waters of Snap Inc. You are in this for the money, only. So is everyone around you.

Nobody has ever been able to explain a business plan to me. I have watched us innovate, release products, be ripped off. We rinse; we repeat. I don't get it. Maybe you will have better luck understanding our business model if you join.

There was some weird, unspoken war between the SFO office and the rest of the company. They won, then lost, and now it's NYC and SEA mixing it up with LA. Different compensation and reviews in each location. Likewise, between the GOOG and AMZN folks who lost, then won. The bars are way uneven. Like way uneven (#callback to that incentives are all misaligned, #callback).

(Also, note to the reader: The HR department at Snap has written a lot of glowing & misleading reviews. Be sure to speak to a real engineer before interviewing and get their take so that you know what's real and what's not. This is what it's really like. Were you expecting a more technical job?)

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