What's the current situation at Zoox?
Nov 24, 2020
38 Comments
Have recently started receiving mails from recruiters at Zoox. I was definitely interested in the company before, but I'm unsure after the amazon acquisition. Any current/ex employees can elaborate on the current state of things?
comments
Explanation. Management screwed employees once before and now has a carrot on a stick. The vesting terms are horrible 6years. And if you decide to leave in middle or before 3 years you get peanuts. And you dont get to keep the zars after you leave. Also no amazon refreshers.
Original post below:
I’ve been at Zoox for a couple years now, and it’s honestly been a rather bad experience from a career growth perspective. The leadership of my org and the company as a whole leaves a lot to be desired. I also battle our development/validation processes and infrastructure far more than actual engineering problems. We’re still dealing with many of the same issues we were facing years ago, and we’ve failed to bring in new hires at anywhere near target rates to fill needs.
I like my teammates and manager, but the work culture is a mess. Documentation is non-existent for too many things. We struggle with ownership and defining where responsibilities begin and end. The development cycle is often: put out an MVP without much thought to requirements and architecture and then have various engineers play hot potato and iterate on it for years with little direction. Follow-through on key projects is impossible when someone up the chain demands we drop everything to achieve some other milestone without sufficient consideration for the opportunity cost. Quarterly plans might as well not exist given how quickly they get thrown out the window.
On top of this, individual agency and autonomy have taken a pretty big hit over the past year, perhaps in effort to address some of the aforementioned issues. It’s a very different company now from when I joined, and while the company is now financially secure, the employee experience is not necessarily better.
While I learned some new tech when I joined and have definitely improved general software skills, the narrow scope of my work leaves me feeling like I’ve regressed in many other areas.
Maybe other parts of the company are better, but from my experiences, I’d be hesitant to consider joining.