Pros
- Amazing work-life balance and PTO system - Great WFH flexibility. Family-friendly company - Decent culture and nice people
Kontras
- Abysmal compensation for software engineers (esp. in the Seattle area, where you can get a 40%+ compensation boost at the company next door). Spend a little time studying and you'll be paid more than Liberty's senior engineers - Benefits are subpar, except for PTO system - Dry and boring insurance industry - Annoyingly obsessed with being agile that you waste so much time trying to be agile - Constant legacy systems maintenance and mountains of technical debt. You'll barely be writing feature work - Subpar engineering practices, weak engineering culture - Engineering managers likely don't know how to code. Great, they won't micromanage you. But they haven't the slightest clue what you do though, so how will they develop you? For the young college hire, how do they develop your technical skills in the right way? How do you know if your work is of good quality? How do they rate your performance accurately? Most engineering managers are unfortunately out of touch with their direct reports - Because engineering managers are so out of touch with their engineers, this means the same for leadership. Once these managers stay here long enough, they get promoted to leadership positions and have no idea how their engineers work. You can tell because they recently changed the titles and you can see how out of touch they are with the industry and with tech. Configuration engineer? Solutions engineer? These titles don't reflect what these roles actually do - Promotions happen because of tenure, not because of skill. This can be a pro for the unambitious but is a huge con in engineering because unskilled engineers will be promoted if you just stick around long enough. Senior engineers with weak engineering skills will only worsen the technical debt - Dress code in 2020? Embarrassing practice and unnecessary for folks who only see their direct team members on a daily basis - TechStart program for college new hires is extremely infantilizing. Okay for people transitioning into tech from a nontech background, but lots of new hires already had a background in tech so a whole year of engineering talent is wasted - Engineers here just want to get by and get paid. If you are ambitious and driven, you'll find better treatment and career development at another company