Not an engineer's place to be - Software Engineer Groupon Employee Review

If you are an engineer and looking for long term prospects, this is not a place you want to be. Lots of politics and bureaucracy. No matter how good you are, if you are not in good terms with higher management, forget about promotion. Once you join, you will quickly realise that SDE1,2and3 are all internally software engineers. But recruiters sell SDE3 as senior engineer while hiring. SDE4 is actually a senior engineer. Also don't be surprised if you find SDE3's earning more than SDE4. And your compensation might also vary based on team you are joining. You will be offered bonus and stocks as part of your CTC but its wise not to consider them at all. Groupon stock keeps on reaching its new low. And bonus, if you are really lucky you might get 30-40% of the amount mentioned. Bonus calculation, which compromises of company's and your own performance, is flawed. Company's performance takes precedence over your own, its not distributed 50-50. For ex - If company's performance is 50% and ours is 100%, you will only get 100% of 50% (Not 75%) Managers and business organisations are changed frequently. So its not very uncommon to have 3-4 managers over a year. No solid engineering plan in place. No roadmaps, not clear transparency. S-team is only focused on teams that makes money for business, all other teams are treated as B-teams. My personal view - Groupon is a nice place to be for short term but definitely not for a long term perspective.