Yelp

Great company culture, and management is great to you in your first year (when they can use a weird, non-standard levelling system to pay you less). Fully remote, which is amazing. Frequent remote offsite events.

Yelp subscribes to this weird leveling system and tries to make it seem as if your worth as an engineer is tied to this system. In reality, the system is very open to interpretation. If you aren’t well-liked by your manager or have solid 1-1 examples of other people getting promoted compared to what you have done, they will always find a way to say you aren’t meeting a level requirement.

Yelp preaches about being open with management and employees, but in reality, they are documenting perceived negativity. For example, a manager might be glad you had to do an on-call stint to fix a critical issue, but months later will use this same issue as a “negative” that you aren’t able to maintain work-life balance.

Understandably, you need to protect your own jobs, but don’t lie to employees that you have their best interests at heart. Be honest about what is going on so employees can accurately get an understanding of their performance.