A disastrous combination of brogramming, institutionalized cowboy coding and incompetent management.
Pros
- Lots of free food, parties and alcohol. If you're a "bro" then you'll have a great time.
Cons
- Tumblr is run on a tangled mess of homegrown tools, horrendously fragile code and the worst engineering practices I've ever seen from any company. There is no QA, code reviews aren't taken seriously, anyone can commit to master and push their code to production at any time. The entire development process can best be described as institutionalized cowboy coding. - Brogramming is real and Tumblr exemplifies it. It was the norm for bros to knowingly push buggy, incomplete, untested code into production after a few rounds of drinks then leave the problems for others while they moved onto another project. - Engineering management is filled with dead weight who have been loyal and stuck around long enough. They aren't qualified to lead teams, they have horrendous technical knowledge and do absolutely nothing to help grow the careers of their subordinates. - Every position from VPs down to engineers are a revolving door, every week at least one person quits and the one thing that the people who quit have in common is that they were very good at their jobs. I can safely say that if you see someone has been at Tumblr more than six months they are looking for a new job; if they are there for two years or more they are probably incompetent. Absolutely no one who has options stays at Tumblr. - New employees, no matter how experienced, are treated like they are complete idiots. Recently, I watched someone who had more experience than everyone on his team quit out of frustration. His manager told other people that he was useless and contributed nothing. What the manager didn't realize was the same person he called useless had accepted a more senior role at Google.
