Target

Amazing work-life balance. Get to work on the latest technologies.

Very good pay, bonus, and benefits.

Frequent trips to the US in my group.

Tech teams get the latest MacBook Pro.

Tech directors have no clue of how product gets developed. This trickles down to the junior managers and to the team. You get hired if you have mentioned the skills they need on your resume. No regard to your ambitions, but you may get hired at a much lower level than you expect. Interviewing persons for a higher level with lesser experience is not at all uncommon. This demotivates individuals easily.

The developer segment now (2 months back there were at least 5-6 designations) has just 2 levels: eng and sr. eng. No designation of an architect; it is all merged into sr. eng. The top segment has a lot of designations:

• Eng consultant
• Eng manager
• Group manager
• Sr. group manager
• Director
• Sr. director

and so on. The growth is very, very slow. So if you are a sr. eng. with 10+ years of experience, you have a long way to go to get to even a manager level. So if you are considering a career at Target, make sure you have researched the right designation/path; failing which, you are bound to get demotivated easily.

If they had to normalize designations across developer/architects, they have to be fair and normalize at the top layers too, but they didn't.

WARNING: If you are 10+ years on a technical path, DO NOT SETTLE FOR A SR. ENGINEER.

Be planned and aggressive, and not just blindly aggressive. You are not nurturing employees for a mad bull race.

Be aware of a person's ambitions and growth path.