I've worked at a company that people really love to praise and it's by far the most challenging place I've worked. In my couple years, I've had 6 managers and been re-org'd almost every year.
The tooling is terrible, we constantly thrash priorities, the "culture" is non-existent beyond emojis. Getting stuff done is often met with hostility by other teams, or even worse, bad-faith requirement tail-chasing.
Rant: At one point, they locked down everyone's ability to review code and had everyone fill out a google survey with questions like "name 2-3 people who you trust to review code". The people with the most nominations became the only ones that could approve code reviews. To get into this club, you had to provide 10 example PRs that demonstrated your worth, and being a certified code reviewer even made it into the eng ladder as an expectation (I can only imagine the amount of wasted work people put in creating/finding/reviewing "complex" PRs). Eventually the backlash caused them to relax the system but it shows how they treat the old guard against the new folk (in their eyes reliability problems are due to the new people, not the broken systems that can't scale beyond 3-4 people). Everything is code-gen'd and checked into source control due to some insane invariant, trying to reason about infrastructure outside of the 1-2 major usecases (ruby monolith api or java payments code) is a punishment reserved for the new hire or in the worst case the "runner", who has to carry the world on their shoulders because the eng organization runs off of reactive-jira-wackamole (enhanced by slack integrations!) competing against a bi-annual waterfall planning (that your manager needs to deliver or else .. nothing happens, we fudge the OKR scores and do it all again). God forbid any non-tech org need eng help, that's not going to happen so they build their own mini-kingdom with competing tooling and n+1 SaaS integrations.
I've been oncall for major systems that power the internet and our oncall/runner toil is the worst I've seen, we pathologically throw humans at problems because tech leadership can't commit to a smaller set of priorities as the can has been kicked one-too-many times. The product is great and the company is well run fiscally but I believe the eng org requires a major shake up.
The tooling is terrible, we constantly thrash priorities, the "culture" is non-existent beyond emojis. Getting stuff done is often met with hostility by other teams, or even worse, bad-faith requirement tail-chasing.
Rant: At one point, they locked down everyone's ability to review code and had everyone fill out a google survey with questions like "name 2-3 people who you trust to review code". The people with the most nominations became the only ones that could approve code reviews. To get into this club, you had to provide 10 example PRs that demonstrated your worth, and being a certified code reviewer even made it into the eng ladder as an expectation (I can only imagine the amount of wasted work people put in creating/finding/reviewing "complex" PRs). Eventually the backlash caused them to relax the system but it shows how they treat the old guard against the new folk (in their eyes reliability problems are due to the new people, not the broken systems that can't scale beyond 3-4 people). Everything is code-gen'd and checked into source control due to some insane invariant, trying to reason about infrastructure outside of the 1-2 major usecases (ruby monolith api or java payments code) is a punishment reserved for the new hire or in the worst case the "runner", who has to carry the world on their shoulders because the eng organization runs off of reactive-jira-wackamole (enhanced by slack integrations!) competing against a bi-annual waterfall planning (that your manager needs to deliver or else .. nothing happens, we fudge the OKR scores and do it all again). God forbid any non-tech org need eng help, that's not going to happen so they build their own mini-kingdom with competing tooling and n+1 SaaS integrations.
I've been oncall for major systems that power the internet and our oncall/runner toil is the worst I've seen, we pathologically throw humans at problems because tech leadership can't commit to a smaller set of priorities as the can has been kicked one-too-many times. The product is great and the company is well run fiscally but I believe the eng org requires a major shake up.