Slack reviews

No accountability from leadership (Directors and above) on the decisions they made that impacted the ability of the team to deliver and have enough resources to perform. There was a ton of organizational change and thrash in the last one year, not to mention everything going on with the pandemic/social justice issues/the election/etc. and, while senior leadership made statements about how folks would be supported through all of that and to take the time they needed, it was all just empty platitudes. Many decisions were made by senior leadership that impacted how the team was able to perform and deliver on targets, and the workload only increased even more while the team had been under-resourced for a long time. There was an increase in recruiting pipelines, increased number of required trainings, and increased number of required projects. After all of that, there was barely any value or recognition represented in the very small compensation increases across the team (or none at all) compared to previous years, and no equity refreshers for anyone in this organization. There was a severe lack of visibility from senior leadership and the previous culture of empathy and empowerment is no longer felt. Many people on the team have shared feedback with leadership about creating shared accountability and trainings with hiring partners but it ended up no where. Hiring partners will continue to point fingers at recruiting for not delivering even if they are a big reason why targets are not met. Executive partners don't see the value in recruiting and that was made very apparent in many ways. Team morale has been down for a long time (more than a year) and nothing meaningful was done to address it - leadership would just dodge feedback and/or questions from the team or spin the narrative around team feedback and morale. So disappointing because this was not the culture of the team for a long time and things had really changed in recent years. There's also no growth opportunities beyond a certain level. The outlined career paths for each level on recruiting changed drastically in 2020 and negatively impacted many people, leaving them with no opportunities to grow into higher level roles. Many changes were made to how each level was outlined and what was expected for each level, with a severe lack of clarity or visibility into those decisions. Now is not a good time to join the recruiting team at Slack. They're losing a ton of tenured and very skilled recruiting members on a weekly basis and they're just trying to fill holes and put bandaids on very big open wounds.

This review pertains only to the Data Engineering team within Slack. I am a former member of the DE team who recently quit. I highly advise any prospective candidates to rethink if they want to apply here. The engineering culture and technical caliber here is appalling. Weekly, sometimes daily, outages are the norm. Dev and prod don't match at all, and testing on production data is routine and encouraged by management. On-call is dreaded for the poor engineering soul each week. And firefighting isn't limited to the on-call engineer either, as multiple team members are almost always pulled into incidents. Postmortem meetings are held at a regular cadence (usually at least two per week). The only reason Slack's customers don't experience any of this is because when DE outages happen, they only affect the other internal teams. Almost every aspect of engineers' tools work against them, but management doesn't seem to care. The code base is likewise a mess to behold. An experienced engineer knows that poor tools and poor code means that mistakes are very easy to make, which leads to further problems that compound. As an engineer here, you will be blamed for decreased productivity by leadership, despite the tools and infrastructure being the things that slow you down. On the topic of leadership, DE leadership is visionless and doesn't prioritize permanent fixes or true debt cleanup, but instead encourages technical mediocrity and cowboy coding by rewarding short-term "wins" over long-term stability. Promotions also follow this rule. (Hey, immediate results can be attributed to single people; long-term fallout is distributed across the team and is "blameless.") Several other engineers have quit over the past few months, and I'm sure more will in the future. Join Slack Data Engineering if you want to experience how a mosaic of engineering anti-patterns looks like in practice. P.S. Check out some of the other reviews for Slack DE on Glassdoor, and you'll see a similar sentiment repeated by others.