Work pressure is high and people work after working hours, even after midnight to deliver projects. There are too much attributions for engineers. Your daily work as an engineer involves: the expertise you were hired for + the stack out of your expertise (AKA everyone is expected to be fullstack regardless of their role) + frequent hotfixes + reviewing a massive quantity of PRs (your team's and external teams) + dealing with demands from people in other teams and engaging on discussions across lots of Slack channels + leadership skills. There is a rating system for your competency called TopSteps, which had rates going from "below expectations" to "blowing away expectations". Lately they changed the base rating from "meeting expectations" to "working towards expectations" because "everyone has something to improve". Think of a motivational culture. Transparency was lacking a lot lately too. They made us think that layoffs were unlikely and froze raises "to avoid them". Then they called a meeting to talk about "team restructuring", merging some teams, which seemed unreasonable. It all made sense afterwards, when the layoffs happened. Freezing raises to pay less on the compensation for laid-off people, merging teams because every team would be a lot smaller. Layoffs were brutal. Not all people had the chance to understand what was happening. It was announced over a 10 minutes meeting. People who couldn't attend that had to ask ex-teammates privately to get any clue of what would happen next. Some managers didn't know their engineers were fired until moments after it happened.
