Too many cooks in the kitchen. Strategic vision is out of touch with reality.
Pros
When I worked there, there was a lot of great people who I enjoyed working with. Some people tried very hard to keep the atmosphere fun.
Cons
Turnover. This company doesn't listen to smart people, and lots of them leave. On top of that, the company has weeded out a lot of good people through layoffs. Many of the people left are either jaded and unenthusiastic, or incompetent. Strategic vision. The company has way too many 'software architects' and technical managers who are hyper focused on playing with 'cool technologies' and designing complicated systems. The company spends millions of dollars engineering products and systems that nobody uses and contribute nothing to the company's portfolio while completely ignoring the problems that actually need to be solved for the sake of the products that actually have customers. The architects find 'pet' technologies and will do whatever it takes to shoe horn those technologies into anything they can. They're constantly trying to rewrite things in React or Cassandra or their homemade network proxy instead of fixing the performance issues users complain about or implementing features that would help the company stay competitive. Everything gets outsourced. QA gets outsourced, infrastructure gets outsourced, IT gets outsourced, core product development gets outsourced. The important work gets outsourced to people who don't do a good job, while the company's direct employees get allocated to building non-core business software that could have just been bought off the shelf. Pay increases are low, and the best way to get a raise/promotion is to get another job offer. The company has too many expensive, unproductive layers of management, and the people doing the actual work don't get rewarded for it; the management above them does instead.
