Meta reviews

My experience is in the enterprise engineering org. * Very individualistic mindset, team is only the logo on the swag you get. * Several years of unattended spaghetti engineering that nobody dares to handle, but someone has to maintain (and get burnt doing so). * Awful oncalls due to the horrible engineering practices and mountains of tech debt. * Blame showers during incident reviews (and incident triaging). * Over the fence handovers. Fake promises by recruiters, lack of leadership. * Walls between orgs for transfers and artificial, per-org devopment limitations. It's better to leave and reinterview with a chance of getting better offer than trying to move internally (and still going through the interviews) and getting your level frozen for a year. There's some efforts to improve engineering practices, but get smudged and diluted by the lack of will and understanding from the leadership, and the lack of reward from the global org (doing two really crappy things gives you more performance review points than doing something with high quality, and/or refactoring any amount of the crappy things around).

The internal career system seems well intended and fair at first, until you try to follow it. Very poor work-life balance. I've never worked so much in my entire career, yet it never seems enough to satisfy the criteria to grow up internally. All internal systems are custom made and many times they compare poorly to open-source alternatives, specially from usability and stability perspective. Which means you will spend a long time to master the internal tooling and all that hard-earned knowledge will be worthless when you leave the company. Also, that all engineers have so much freedom means that everyone is constantly reinventing the wheel, and increasing the overall complexity of the environment thus changes harder and harder as time goes by. This is exacerbated by the bonus system, which for many years has encouraged engineers to build and deliver new things rather than fixing existing issues. All of this combined has lead to a monstrous internal ecosystem which is a huge pile of entangled hair, where the simplest of tasks requires careful planning and understanding and will take several days. Management has lately changed the incentives to encourage fixing and better quality, but it's too little too late.