- pay is very low for the area, and it is especially so if you have no experience / are fresh out of school. if you're in the right place at the right time you might be able to make some moves to help increase compensation, but by far the biggest raise i got was from leaving. if you're coming from another company that mgmt recognizes as a "big player" you can probably get a decent package, though. overall, i felt a bit nickel-and-dime'd whenever salary came up.
- immediate management doesn't pay attention to your career goals. i applied for and accepted an offer for one role, was instead placed in a different role for a year upon joining, transitioned to another (yet again) different role for a year after that, and finally after two years got the actual role i had applied for when i joined. out of the few years i had been there, i had only ever had 1 lead who seriously asked me where i wanted to move my career and helped come up with an action plan to achieve that. all other feedback from management was 'well just keep working hard'.
- i didn't really like the the way they handled the growing pains of trying to pursue a new product in a new field. it seemed like all the management just up-and-left, leaving their product teams in limbo, and then they started sniping some engineers to join these new products while others were basically told "you don't need to look for a new job... yet". they've revised the message a lot, but its still a bit unclear.
and some other points that are kinda grab-bag:
- never got the feeling management was giving the full picture in office standups. would have appreciated more transparency around uncertainty, conflict, etc.
- there were a few folks who worked with us and then one day suddenly didn't, and there was never any official word/explanation from management. was kind of weird.
- would have liked having a mentoring system in place
- minor, but never got the sense we were really market leaders in anything. not sure we're first in anything we pursue.
