Pros
Pay was good. My team was amazing, the caliber of talented engineers is very high and we got along well. You were actually able to use your Unlimited PTO.
Cons
* Apparently there is zero job security. We had been informed that revenue targets were missed and we needed to try to trim costs, then an email on 2/22/23 was sent by the CEO at 5:30am EST announcing that they are cutting 6% of employees effective immediately. I woke up to a surprise meeting invite and was explicitly forbidden from even saying goodbye to my friends or passing along some crucial info about my very large, not-quite-finished project. In my entire career, I've never experienced anything so heartless and cold as that meeting. * To my knowledge the company was not losing money, simply not making as much as they had projected for the quarter. I can't stress enough how sociopathic and indefensible these layoffs are. This isn't about saving the company, it's about short-term numbers needing to go up unbounded for all time. It's like Fortra is the Titanic and they're still in that stage where they want to prioritize keeping the First Class passengers happy and oblivious, smoothing over the immediate side effects of the emergency while ensuring the larger, systemic problem is going to destroy them. * Speaking of which, remember how they rebranded as Fortra just a few months ago? Someone ask the CEO how much that rebrand cost us. Again, priorities are completely out of line with reality. Who spends that kind of money on cosmetic nonsense and then says "oops we need to destroy hundreds of lives to save a few bucks"? (the answer is depressingly and predictably "everyone in the tech industry ") * My team of (until 2/22) 5 was expected to maintain a pipeline that handled millions of emails per hour with zero tolerance for downtime. Our on-call rotation had become a death march, especially after losing another engineer in December. Related to that.... * Everything barely works. There is an insurmountable mountain of tech debt here and working on it is frowned upon. It is just considered completely normal to get a half dozen pages per day (or night or 3am...) for something just locking up for no apparent reason. You're expected to go reboot that component and no one ever cared to actually investigate why it was happening regularly to fix the underlying problem. Why bother when you can just keep churning through burnt-out engineers? * At least 3 engineers I know of (other than myself) were laid off suddenly on 2/22, and that's just my immediate team. They were barely coping with near-weekly dumpster fire level emergencies before, I have to wonder how they expect to do anything with even fewer people (and these were not junior level devs who were cut...). * Management has no earthly idea how to manage people. My team received a new manager a few months ago who is the single most incompetent person I've ever had to report to. * The cult of Scrum is strong here. I can explicitly name at least 3 separate incidents where the emphasis on "completing the sprint on time" directly led to significant system degradation or full-on outages, and dozens more where the impact wasn't so large but whoever was on call had their day ruined by people rushing to make their own stats look good by churning through JIRA tickets. If you even suggest that this adherence to scrum isn't working, you are basically a pariah here. * No direction. The Venn Diagram of what I was told I was hired to do and what I actually did had very little overlap. We have explicit teams for SRE and Infra, yet a very significant amount of what I did should have fallen under their purview (especially the on-call stuff....what's an SRE team for if not exactly that?). I was suddenly expected to work on components written in a language I had never touched in my career, then harassed because it was taking so long and "jeopardizing the sprint" (translation: jeopardizing how the manager looked because a number in a report didn't go up). Projects were canceled and only after did I learn it was actually the second or third attempt at completing that project only for it to be shelved again....it's chaos. * Despite saying there was flexibility and mobility, it seemed like anyone who didn't stay in their lane was immediately squashed back into it. * My team was a complete sausage-fest. I interacted with a total of THREE women in engineering in my entire tenure here. Racial diversity was shockingly good, but there were no women in engineering here.
