I spent just over a year up here at the Seattle mothership back in the mid-20-teens. I met a few really smart / kind people that I'm still friends with (I even liked my boss, who I'm going to have coffee with after the holiday craziness.) I last a year. Most everyone I know there I know left.
My experience was similar. On the first day of orientation we were trying to build an environment to run some tests in. But some aspect of it was borked. I got to file a Sev 2 ticket my first day of work. The component that completed the dependency closure was borked (what was that, brazil? can't remember the name.) But the whole company spent two hours not building software.
I love that all teams advertise their capabilities through online services, but man.. it would have been cool if maybe they tested that update to the build system since we were all forced to use it.
The other big hilarious problem was when we ran out of IP addresses for new sites. Long story short someone made a mistake three or four teams up the chain and it only became obvious when we tried to allocate a new routable (public) IP address. The problem was in the DNS team, but we didn't use their service interface directly, so we had to wait while the team upstream of us responded. And then they had to file a ticket with the team upstream of them. And so on.
It always seemed to me that while they were trying to prevent their interfaces from being brittle, they missed out on some opportunities to understand what was going on by looking at data flowing from one team to another. I hope there's SOMEONE in the company doing that, but we never met them.
Not all my work relationships were toxic, but I saw quite a bit of toxicity while there.
I quit the day after my then new boss wore a MAGA hat to work and made comments about killing trans-folk (I'm f2m.) Our HR rep was out on vacation and the main office indicated they weren't interested in doing anything about it. I probably should have sued, but it wasn't clear I had a strong case (he said/xe said). At the very least I could have forced everyone to take another sensitivity training class.
Which is to say... There are some amazing people there. Also some complete shits. If you have a high tolerance for death threats, you'll probably do fine there. Some of the technology is amazing. Some of it is completely bonkers. When things are good, they're amazing and very good. When they're bad, they're hellish.
My experience was similar. On the first day of orientation we were trying to build an environment to run some tests in. But some aspect of it was borked. I got to file a Sev 2 ticket my first day of work. The component that completed the dependency closure was borked (what was that, brazil? can't remember the name.) But the whole company spent two hours not building software.
I love that all teams advertise their capabilities through online services, but man.. it would have been cool if maybe they tested that update to the build system since we were all forced to use it.
The other big hilarious problem was when we ran out of IP addresses for new sites. Long story short someone made a mistake three or four teams up the chain and it only became obvious when we tried to allocate a new routable (public) IP address. The problem was in the DNS team, but we didn't use their service interface directly, so we had to wait while the team upstream of us responded. And then they had to file a ticket with the team upstream of them. And so on.
It always seemed to me that while they were trying to prevent their interfaces from being brittle, they missed out on some opportunities to understand what was going on by looking at data flowing from one team to another. I hope there's SOMEONE in the company doing that, but we never met them.
Not all my work relationships were toxic, but I saw quite a bit of toxicity while there.
I quit the day after my then new boss wore a MAGA hat to work and made comments about killing trans-folk (I'm f2m.) Our HR rep was out on vacation and the main office indicated they weren't interested in doing anything about it. I probably should have sued, but it wasn't clear I had a strong case (he said/xe said). At the very least I could have forced everyone to take another sensitivity training class.
Which is to say... There are some amazing people there. Also some complete shits. If you have a high tolerance for death threats, you'll probably do fine there. Some of the technology is amazing. Some of it is completely bonkers. When things are good, they're amazing and very good. When they're bad, they're hellish.