Pros
- Extremely easy interview, so an easy job to get - Generous benefits - I was paid more than US Senators to mostly sit around waiting for management to decide on the scope of my project, waiting to be unblocked by other engineering teams, and in some cases waiting for the dev environment to be usable so I could write code. I've never made so much money doing so little.
Cons
- The leadership teams at Granular and its parent company Corteva are not aligned, and this is felt even at the IC level - The quality of engineering talent is poor compared to every other company I've worked for - There are many engineers and architects with extremely long tenures at Granular. This is a con because the most senior engineers and architects have not been exposed to many new ideas and are generally out of step with modern best practices. - If I had to describe the engineering culture in a single phrase, it would be "beaten down." Problems are acknowledged but no one is empowered to fix them and no one cares enough to fight for solutions. There's some common advice that says that for any job you should either earn or learn. Ideally you're doing both, but if you're not doing either you should quit. I wasn't doing either, so I paid back my signing bonus and left for a startup where I made the same salary but am actually learning things and advancing my skills.