Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: It's laid back and there aren't many work pressures.
There's free coffee and food.
Foosball, TT, and many people to play with.
Cons: Since there is nothing much to do, and lots of coffee to drink when not doing it, there's a lot of time on people's hands to create politics at every level.
In my team, which is a technical team, they change the leader every quarter on some pretext or the other. Much of the time, it is clear that the leader in Minneapolis needs some local lackey and keeps changing their mind on whom.
There is no roadmap, as much though there are many meetings around it, because there are 5 managers for every engineer or analyst or working employee. These managers keep 1/1s that are recurring, they also keep 3-4 one-on-ones and then many on many meetings.
Every two quarters, they start a re-architecture roadmap. No one knows what the difference is between re-architecting, refactoring, and just coding.
The SVP says things like, "We are number 1 in selling swimwear, thanks to all your efforts," to the engineering teams that have no idea why their efforts led to selling swimwear.
She started many efforts that failed, I hear, so she's been rewarded with running digital, which is code for internet commerce.
We are all in one happy mess, but there's TT, free food, access to compute, and coffee. So we are here trying to make the best of those.