Interviewing for Senior Software Engineer at Gemini. Hard to find much out there on the engineering culture — can anyone lend some insights into their engineering culture? Cheers
We're not really a technology company, upper management does not have credibility in tech or other industries tbh, they mainly got their positions by being close with the founders. As a result engineering is seen as lower, it's best to be in product or sales. But even our product team is not like what you might expect from Google or FB, these people mainly collect updates from around the org and make powerpoints offering little to no value add. But these are the people who have all the power and the engineering culture really suffers because of it. Our CTO lost a power struggle early this year and was fired. His LinkedIn says he left recently but in reality he has been gone for the better part of this year. We had a lengthy CTO search to replace him but every time we put out an offer, it gets turned down. There is mass attrition in all engineering teams, those who are still here are actively searching for their next job.
Looks like a VP just joined from Netflix and a manager from Uber just recently joined too
Netflix fires easily so you would only go from Netflix to Gemini if the writing was on the wall. Uber also has a ton of issues with attrition lately, not sure what a manager from there is going to do. The point I'm making is that there's a severe lack of talent that is glaringly obvious. People here with incredibly impressive sounding titles have shockingly unimpressive abilities. No one comes here to work, people come to play the game of thrones and get a bit of that Winklevoss Bitcoin investment money.
No the projects are poorly planned and scoped and the engineers are forced to work around the clock to deliver. Gemini delivers the slowest features to market so you’ll start to form an idea of how dysfunctional the engineering teams are.
Just watch out for Mercury being in retrograde