PSA - Don’t join HBO Max

I joined HBO Max 6 months ago and it has been a shitshow ever since I joined. I came from a no-name company so I thought joining a big media company would open doors for me. I wanted to learn and deliver and I was so wrong. I am outlining a couple things that are absolutely wrong here. 1. There is no engineering culture. Everything is hacked together to deliver against arbitrary deadlines 2. The management is super top down. The show is run by a couple of top level executives who kiss ass and want their ass kissed. You will find the true meaning of favoritism here. 3. WLB is terrible. People are expected to work weekends. Yes, you heard it right. We are working weekends. There are syncs scheduled and people cheer when they work 12 hour workdays. 4. No growth for engineers. There is nothing to learn. It’s just a feature factory. Churn features and deliver to overloads 5. Micromanagement at scale. The senior exec wants to control everything. They even want to control when our software gets deployed. Deploying a service change requires permissions from VPs. So much for full CI / CD. 6. Any design doc presented must be approved by senior exec. Did I mention micromanagement already? Well, there’s more! 7. Morale sucks and the leadership does nothing to fix it. A lot of people were laid off and there’s more layoffs to come 8. There is no certainty of anything. There is information hidden from everyone throughout. Even the CEO didn’t know about Discovery merger. 9. Engineers and PMs are treated as fungible resources. A lot of senior PMs and engineers have left because there is no ownership. 10. Deadline driven culture. Leadership just comes up with deadlines and you’re supposed to just execute on it. No reasons or explanations. None of this should be a surprise based on how shitty the app is and how many fuckups there has been. However, if you think I’m joking, read the blind reviews of HBO. They are 100% accurate. Here’s to all the Blind people - if given the choice, do not come to HBO Max. It’s a shitshow and you will regret every minute of your life there. I am already switching even though I have to pay back signing bonus because this place isn’t worth it. Obligatory: TC 300k YOE: 6 #tech #hbomax #hbo #warnermedia