A recruiter reached out and I was wondering if anyone had any feedback ok WLB and stability of the company? It has a huge amount of funds raised, but seem to have had some product shifts in the past couple of years (and new management). Current TC ~300k #indigoag
I left in March. Horrible experience. Wouldn't recommend to an enemy. They throw so many personnel at every project. If you like bike shedding more than writing code, you'll love it.
@cargurus can you share more about why it was a horrible experience?
Sure, I'll try. I work in front end, and there were a lot of us. A lot. Doing not that much work. And they were constantly hiring more, and shuffling people around. Nobody ever refactored anything, and a lot of nasty buggy code was reused all over Marketplace, which was a huge project. The tight coupling that you couldn't really refactor anything because it would break everybody else's code. It was obvious to me that the project had been started with the intention of using all the trendy new technologies to attract developers. But the people who bootstrapped it probably hadn't worked in react, or TypeScript before. And because of the constant stream of new hires, most of whom were also using TypeScript and GraphQL and such for the first time, bad practices were laid on top of bad practices. Most of our new highers had never written a react hook before, which would have been fine if there had been code with good usage of react hooks for them to learn from. There wasn't. Just LGTM code reviews. I was hired to work on one team, and then moved to another one 6 months later. Where I stayed for a year. We did very little in that time, achieving less than I could have done on my own because of the horrible foundation we were building on. There is a constant feeling of churn and need for velocity right now, so much so that they use it as an excuse not to do any actual engineering. I tried to implement better practices, improve testing, rebuild some of the buggiest features, but it was impossible to gain traction in such a large organization with so many teams.
Marketplace was and still is very toxic environment. The other 2 (biologicals and Carbon) have great work environments. It’s like Marketplace is a different company in terms of the toxicity. It starts at the top.
I interviewed with them. Good company, very friendly people. Legit mission. They seem to have product alignment now after recent shift. They had none of the arrogance so common among Bay Area engineers.
How did the interview turn out? Did you join?