SoFi

Certain times of year (especially holidays and shortly after) are very quiet.

Very remote-work friendly/non-strict RTO policy.

Impressively dysfunctional engineering culture. Much more talking about building software than actually producing it.

You aren’t going to find real software engineering innovation or inspiring engineering leaders here if you already have some experience.

Overall, it’s extremely difficult to build good software here. The engineering primitives and infrastructure that would make it possible to build interesting things quickly and reliably either don’t exist or are so minimally invested in that each project tends to need to whip together its own basics in the tiny window of time before the next “extremely important” project is shoved on a group’s plate by various independent areas of leadership that don’t understand what’s taking so long.

Focus. On the long game, but also focus on building good products quickly and reliably before moving on to the next shiny thing.

Have a long-term product direction instead of 10 short-term product directions.

Give employees the agency to take a long-term direction and build toward it, learn from what was done yesterday, and iterate it forward. Being a regulated company does tie hands in many ways, but that’s not an excuse to withhold the delegation of responsibility.