Verkada

• Not many come to mind.
• Decent compensation, although the prohibition of COLA raises and an insidiously slow stock vesting schedule make it worse than it appears.
• The spiral staircase at HQ is neat.
• Seriously, that's about it.

Engineering org

Planning is done at the granularity of quarters. Tasks that take longer than a quarter, overlap two quarters, or are shorter than a quarter are poorly tracked, if tracked at all.

Code review and design review are looked at with disdain, as many engineers struggle to wrap up poorly planned, quarter-based work.

Turnover is high. Most questions about how to maintain or improve existing services or features garner "so-and-so worked a lot on that, but they left a while back."

Engineering leadership has a strong aversion to agile software development and any flexibility with working from home, in stark contrast to successful software companies. This is despite their current planning being dreadful.

Younger or new-grad engineers, who can often be empowered to learn and grow in startups, are not being taught any coding or design standards. Instead, they are learning bad habits about rushing out unmaintainable, barely working software to meet quarterly goals set by upper management.

The engineering org isn't growing and is clearly not a priority of leadership.

• Prioritize engineering.
• Grow the engineering org and hire experienced and talented engineers, rather than churn through new grads who are expected to work every night and every weekend.
• Focus on quality rather than rushing out a dozen features that barely work each quarter.
• Embrace, rather than reject, practices of successful software companies, such as agile development, normalized compensation, flexible WFH, and empowering engineering to build and maintain solid products.
• Stop trying to reinvent the wheel and making it square when it comes to running a successful tech company. You're not geniuses for refusing to grow the engineering org to hire more salespeople with ridiculous quotas, and the results speak for themselves.