Kin Insurance Reviews

- My last raise was under the rate of inflation, as were the raises of all 5 of the coworkers I talked to, so we basically got a pay cut. - A lot of employee churn - many people are changing teams or resigning regularly. This means a lot of things are lost in the shuffle, like knowledge on the code, or employee progress plans. They also haven't been backfilling, so my team has shrunk a lot, but the expectations on us have increased. - The main code base is a wreck and not at all fun to work in. It's extremely tightly coupled, it's poorly documented, and most of the people who knew anything about it left. Changing anything in one of the god-objects is a fun game of "What did I break, and will I find out before or after the code is deployed?" Fresh code becomes legacy code almost immediately because engineered are hustled on to the next project and not given time to do cleanup, docs, tech debt, etc. - A lot of time pressure. They really saw the word "sprint" and decided that sprinting is the speed we're aiming for. Scrum meetings are less "we as a team decide on what to do and how much work we're ok committing to" and more "product gives us things and we get to maybe sort of pick which too-large workload we want." I don't think I've has a single sprint where we don't carry over at least 2 tickets. - Feels weirdly stiff for a startup. That might be the insurance side of it? But none of my coworkers are interested in making conversation beyond the occasional "How was your weekend?" "Good. Yours?" Might be a pro if you hate small talk but I find it hard to build rapport when no one wants to talk for more than 15 seconds about their life outside of work. - Even though I've found it to be reasonably queer friendly, and there are a few BIPOC folks, it's still very much a tech/insurance company in diversity. My team is 2/1 men to women and 3/1 white folks to POC. Upper management in tech is almost exclusively white men. - For higher level positions, there seems to be a lot of hiring external people rather than promoting internally.

There is a lot of churn around teams. The purpose of teams is not clear, and role clarification is not clear either. 
 There is a lot of firefighting and heroism, and people are rewarded more for their ability to put out fires than they are for creating long-term solutions. Case in point, there was a large fire put out last year and the people who put out the fire were all given bonuses, while the people working on the long-term solution was insulted and then the team was disbanded. 

Front end work and engineers are not valued as highly as back end. The culture has improved, but is still biased toward back end.