Meta reviews

... though one thing you can't do is work a four day week, at least not as a manager. It's pretty full-on: there's always loads to do and for a UK manager, 5pm-7pm Mon-Thurs is video conference season. If you don't mind coming in late to stay late that can be OK, but if you prefer to start early, it makes for a long day.

There are several. Note that the role specific ones are only for data engineers. What I have found is that there is a lot of difference in the way different groups function, so if you join as a SWE or as a product manager, your experience may be different. 1. The work environment is very open and very noisy. There is absolutely no privacy. This becomes more of a bother here because there are so many people now in all of their buildings. The only time when I was able to do any serious work was when I was working from home. 2. As a data engineer, you will be working with a very old version of Hive (0.10 I think). This is the version even before the one with windowing clauses. I was used to working with a better version that also had CBO and I found this limiting. Not only that, if you do this for a year or two you will be at a disadvantage when you switch jobs. 3. The data engineers are at the lowest rung of the pecking order. Some call them 2nd tier engineers. I call them data peons. They do not get any say in the kind of work they get to do. Any grunt work can be passed on to you and because of the way the review system works, they can screw you if you show any displeasure. An example of this is the data visualizations. The data engineer is expected to do that. I never had to do that before. So you will be spending a lot of time doing housekeeping work like making sure the pipelines run, making sure the font and color choices you made on the dashboards are pleasing to the analysts who sit on top of you in the pecking order. And to add insult to injury, the visualization tool is a home grown one and none of the skills you get from using it are going to help you in a future job i.e. if you plan to continue doing visualizations. 4. Data peons are treated differently as compared to software engineers. Whereas on occasion the software engineers get to work exclusively on different projects for up to a month, there is no such options for data peons. So mobility is very very limited. 5. The performance review system is stacked against data peons. Because they are at the lowest rung, most of the people reviewing them are analysts or above. So the analysts are the overlords even when some of them are absolute idiots. The only ones who can survive in this system are ones with a servile attitude and with mediocre talent and ambition. Some of these are because of recent org changes. A lot of the people I know who joined around the same time as me have left the company.