Success in spite of the company, not because of it
Pros
The team I worked with was nothing short of some of the most incredible people I have known; dedicates, hard working, just trying to do their best.
Cons
If it wasn’t for my teammates, I would have lost my mind. The amount of incompetence at a leadership level is astounding, and when you try to be part of the solution, you’re told you’re being too demanding or there isn’t enough money. News flash: if the lifecycle of your engineers is to request for more hiring, told they can’t get it because there’s not enough money even though (by the time I left), more than 50% of your engineering department has left the company out of frustration, and then they leave, it only burns out the next set of engineers who are now left with even more work. I stuck it out as long as I could because I didn’t want the people I cared about to get screwed over by me leaving; I had to reconcile the fact that I’m not letting those people down, the company is. The pay is terrible (if you get hired in Canada as a Senior Dev, you’re making about the same as a new Junior hire in Seattle after conversion rate - imagine training someone you know is making the same as you with way less responsibility). Lastly, and I’ll say this as an educated guess, but when Ziff Davis acquired Moz, they announced they weren’t firing anyone. My guess is, they didn’t want to fire anyone because there were so many people at Moz who had been there for more than 5 years, so paying that out would be too expensive. Instead, in the following months they stripped all benefits down to nothing so that people would just get upset and leave. Genius, really, even if it’s completely evil. In summary, this is a terrible place to work if you want to work and feel like you’re having a lasting impact, or feel valued by the company in general. My last little story would be this: after being abandoned on a project for more than 10 months, with me asking (begging) for help, I rolled out a new version of a product that set a new industry standard for a particular data category, right before I left the company. It was received with no shout outs or congratulations from anyone for a job well done. In one instance, I was told my work had no value (as a congratulations). I’ll reiterate: this project set a new industry standard. If you work here, you succeed in spite of the company, not because of it.
