Pros
- Some good technical people - OK opportunities and structured career path if you're a recent graduate - Nice perks if you're willing to come into the office - In terms of impact, given the friction and dysfunction within the org, the measurable delta between trying your best and not trying at all is so small, you can achieve nothing and, provided you don't actively point it out, nobody will pick you up on it for years (good work-life-balance)
Cons
- The business side of the org is riddled with unqualified yes-people and virtue-signallers. When the COO makes one of his many cringe-worthy, internal pronouncements on Slack, you only need to see the explosion of uniformly positive reaction emojis to realise there is a deeply unhealthy dynamic being cultivated from within - Very slow moving environment with lots of friction to getting features shipped. There are plenty of sacred cows, and management appears to be disinterested in addressing systemic productivity issues outside of making it a failing at an individual/moral level (i.e work harder). This undermines meaningful discussion of how productivity could be improved and indicates a lack of understanding of the actual issues that product teams face - "Coaching" is just "performance management". Your coach may not be on your team, may be junior to you, or not even of the same specialty, so there's a real limit to the material assistance they can provide you in your day to day work. There is no feedback mechanism in place if your coach is abusing their position, or, for that matter, for literally any other issue you might have (they do look at Glassdoor reviews however) - Fully vested employees (4 year+ tenure) are often absent in one way or another, or (understandably) refuse the engage with the questionable organisation and coaching structures that have been set up. This leads to onboarding, beyond a superficial level, just not being done in many pockets of the organisation - Poor remuneration and, depending on who your coach is and what part of the organisation you're in, little opportunity for career advancement.
