Pros
Met some nice engineers. Free lunch Fridays, well stocked kitchen. Unlimited vacations.
Cons
This company has issues. Most products are overengineered. The CTO does not lead anything except the Operations team. As a result, there is no technical vision about anything other than fancy operations tools that customer don’t care about. And still the COO wonders: “the market is constipated, we don’t know why.” The market is not constipated, you just aren’t building the new products features that future customers care about. The company constantly acts like a big company. Ops will repeatedly reject your product unless every i is dotted and every t is crossed, even if a customer can benefit from it. Forget lean development, this is FAT development. No fun in development unless you’re in operations. No empowerment. You’ll get no freedom to make an impact or create something truly innovative. It takes months, if not years to bring up a new service to production, and even then it’s severely over-designed, over-complicated, and performs poorly. It took them 3 years to set up kerberos. Databases with a few megabytes of data has issues responding to queries. Let me repeat that: This is 2016, and a DB with a few megabytes of data takes minutes to respond to queries. Same pattern follows every other product. If you’re among the “chosen few”, you can design crap and rule supreme. Everyone blindly nods heads to whatever the executives say, for fear of being insulted, as there’s no culture of listening to the engineers. No one is encouraged to challenge the status quo. No real vision for how to solve the future customer’s problem. The product vision does not wow anyone. Similar to Yahoo in its futile attempts to compete with real innovators like Google and Facebook. Will follow the path of Yahoo and die. Obsessed with maintaining status quo and designing(overengineering) bloated solutions that may have worked in the 90s, but would get laughed at now. They spent a year and 10 engineers’ time on a workflow management system for the operations team(which was a bloated wrapper over another workflow system), all the while the company was drowning and not producing anything real for the new customers. However, no one dares to question why so much time and money is spent on such a low value product. COO and CEO are a joke. CEO evades questions on company valuations. Runs another side business. Tried their best to hide the fact that the company was/is sinking. Don’t work here. Don’t trust the positive reviews. They will never change.
