Salesforce reviews

Sort of bizarre workplace environment & culture. I didn't see much in the way of manager training or ensuring that the right ICs were promoted to people manager roles. Annual reviews are in no-way transparent. You are assessed on a set of criteria that is not shared with you (either the criteria or the assessment results). My review was five minutes: "You're doing great!" There was no actionable feedback, stretch goals or written documentation for me to learn and grow from. Leadership in my org very often resorted to bullying and openly shared negative feedback on their own peers with their reports. Several times while working there, I lost my engineering title due to re-orgs and was told that they "didn't want to transfer headcount," so was left with only limited technical work to do for long stretches. And that's my biggest complaint - at least in my org, hard and innovative work was not championed but rather avoided in pursuit of very easy and short-term goals.

Managers can make or break your work environment - ultimately people usually leave due to mismanagement and in my case, due to being taken advantage of, manipulated and bullied. Psychological safety is a term thrown around at Salesforce - it means nothing when the people who are meant to champion and protect you are the ones abusing their place. My manager simply didn’t work, she was hard to contact and I only saw her in the office when someone more senior was visiting (sucking up to the boss). Of course, she had no trouble taking credit for my work or blaming me for things she was meant to do. She made me feel tiny and insignificant to the point of feeling ill before having to meet via video chat (where she would dial in from random places where she was ‘working’). The worst part is that our SVP was aware of this, yet here we are. If you can find a gem of a manager and a team who will fully support you, great. Get it on your CV then get out. But don’t be fooled by the awards and marketing - it’s fake and you’ll slowly see through the cracks.