* engineers are not treated well and beyond SDE 2, career growth is very difficult. so you'll see a bunch of engineers with 10-15 years experience but they are at the same level as those with 1-2 years experience. (they were down leveled when they were hired). they'll be doing the same kind of work as well -- routine, grunt, plumbing type. managers frequently string along engineers, giving them false hopes of promotion and many get frustrated and leave (i know 3 people who left because of this).
* managers are incentivized to give negative performance reviews as much as possible and to put at least 5-10% of their employees on a so called performance improvement plan which is a path to getting fired. this is the case even if all the team members worked really hard and delivered all the planned features on time. i have seen a few people unfairly put on pips. one of them was someone who had gone on *unpaid* maternity leave!
* no work life balance. in my team, i had on-call rotation every 6 weeks. 1 week of secondary oncall followed by 1 week of primary oncall. secondary oncall supports the primary oncall, does deployments, and responds to lower priority customer issues. primary on call had to respond to all high severity issues within minutes. i used to get woken up by the pager a few times per week very late at night.
* lack of work life balance would have been ok if you got rewarded for the hard work. but most people don't. since the stock price has been going up last few years, the RSU refreshers have been limited. also, because promotions are super hard, your comp doesn't go up because you are already at the top end of your level's range.
* overall, the culture favors managers over engineers. the review and promotion system is highly non-transparent. it's like a mafia. managers in an org sit together and decide the fate of the engineers, based on who they like or don't like. it's highly subjective and biased.
* there are no perks.
