Connected Fitness is riddled with an obsession of micromanagement and subsequently, a lack of trust. As a manager for a few years, I learned how to properly protect my team from requests that were ambiguous, impossible, or not ready to accomplish in a given timeline. Often enough though, if I had responded negatively, my decision would be superseded by another non-technical manager talking to one of my direct reports directly (to which they would reply positively). It wouldn't be until later in a planning meeting that a direct report of mine would be assigned work that I specifically declined, which unfortunately resulted in stymying my direct reports' career paths. This caused some distrust amongst leaders from different teams, and subsequently, some attrition due to engineers not being able to work on projects largely related to their development plan. It was because of this lack of trust and my own personal stagnation of career growth that I moved back into an engineering role, in hopes to help foster and drive these technical initiatives.
Connected Fitness operates based on the notion of completing largely product-focused goals at the expense of thoughtfully building a given teammate's career based on their development plan. This meant that most technical projects were met critically with non-technical stakeholders due to the lack of product-facing incentives. Even if technical projects included objectives like improving the user experience, increasing the fidelity and resilience of a session, or reducing crash rates by fixing a system, these were often overlooked for projects that would add a new feature or a new screen against a broken system. Candidly-speaking, this is due to a lack of maturity from the product team.
From a company standpoint, unfortunately the pay is not as competitive as other tech companies in Austin. Due to the volatility of stocks, the bonus percentage payout is inconsistent. Compensation increases are often minimal, and promotion opportunities are difficult to navigate due to the aforementioned issues with product goals and the overall leanness of the engineering teams. In terms of career growth, it is difficult to advance beyond the first few levels unless an opportunity exists for backfilling an open position. For instance, going from a senior engineer to a staff engineer can feel unobtainable given the high expectations and difficulty of accomplishing them, given micromanagement woes.
