Extremely political - Software Engineer Shutterfly Employee Review

1.0
11 May 2015
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Perks are good. You get Shutterfly products twice a year, including mugs, stickers, photo-books, and more. Beautiful offices in Redwood City and Santa Clara. Free snacks and drinks.

Cons

Extremely political. All is managed by product management, just a few people deciding the direction and execution of the entire company. There is no room for innovation. Developer ideas do not count, all is decided top-down. Even engineering management has no voice. They just follow direct instructions from product management. People are constantly leaving due to this. Even trivial ideas can't ever come from the development team. This company is a retail company, that does not understand how to manage technology. Everything is about numbers, and measuring incremental (proven) revenue each initiative will bring. Forget about R&D. This is not a company to work for if you love innovation and new stuff. The company is restructuring itself and everything done is just refactoring of current code to unify the multiple platforms. Would not recommend this company to others.

Explore other reviews about Shutterfly

5.0
20 Apr 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great company to work for

Cons

No cons, excellent place to work

4.0
30 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

I work with diverse and supportive people. Teams and leaders demonstrate the will to respond to worker needs with kindness and respect. On the operational level, teams are highly flexible and adapt quickly to changes when provided proper support. Work-life balance is high priority for the people I interact with.

Cons

The company has difficulty holding on to talent in tech fields since a good chunk of the focus has to be allocated to art/design and production instead. CEOs come and go every few years, leading to instability. For some teams, the process remains overly complex and inefficient because of misalignments between leadership/engineering and ops team users. No formal humanist policy around AI & robotics yet.

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