Incompetent management, misaligned incentives
Pros
Decent pay Hours were very solid - almost never had to work outside hours Work was pretty light, never was pushed super hard for deadlines.
Cons
Lots of really questionable talent. On many occasions, had to do work for other teams because they couldn't get stuff done in time Manager promoted people based on tenure rather than performance. Feedback provided for performance completely vague and irrelevant. Company has awful pip (performance improvement plan) culture with sacrificial lambs on each team to meet the layoff quota. Trying to replicate Amazon's toxic stack ranking but unable to match comp, leading to very short employee retention. Company incentivizes people to build worse versions of open source tooling (so they can use for impactful performance management contribution), forces everyone to use them, then terribly maintains the project/docs, providing minimal to no support. Once everyone has been forced to use said project, it gets deprecated for a newer marginally less crappier version of the same thing.