My thoughts after reading roughly 75% of the article, I couldn't finish it:
I noticed three things:
* This developer is focused around me me me, everything has to revolve around him
* This developer is probably hell to work with
* There was a huge cultural mismatch between him/her and Snap
These were my thoughts while reading the article with some comments after every tl;dr. I wasn't able to finish the article because it felt very whiny and egocentric.
>tl;dr — I knew what I was getting myself into. There were red flags, but I chose to ignore them for the sake of a huge equity offer.
At least the author has a lot of self-awareness.
>tl:dr — Snap starts every employee’s on-boarding off with some real hippy type of shit. The aforementioned hippy shit can continue into your regular employment if you so desire, which I did not.
To me this sounds pretty great? Who doesn't want to work in a team in which there is "real" team bonding? People bond over time and shared experiences. I feel like the author is really cynical and is unable to see the benefit from this. I have worked in dysfunctional teams where it's every man for himself and I prefer the opposite by a large margin.
This screams to me that there is a huge cultural mismatch between the author's ideal place to work and Snap Inc.
>unfortunately the workload we had mostly kept us working separately on our own tasks with little room for interaction. It wasn’t uncommon, for the first part of my time at Snap, to get up in the morning, drive to the office, go through the work-day in the same room as two other people but rarely speaking to each other ...
Then maybe ... talk to each other? The author is literally blaming the workload for being unable to socialise with this coworkers -- in the same freaking room. Take out 10 minutes of your time and have coffee, there is a reason those teambuilding activities exist. But I'm giving the author the benefit of the doubt, so let's continue.
>tl;dr — For the first ~1/2 year at Snap, I was mostly isolated on a handful of projects where I became the sole maintainer, and rarely got to interact much with other engineers or my manager.
I empathise with the author because I too have been in the same situation.
>tl;dr — When I worked for Snap in Venice, we occupied a beach-front condominium with a likely fictitious resident who supposedly slept in our “conference room” to meet zoning requirements.
OK I have to admit, that is really weird and possibly illegal?
>tldr — The Snap Santa Monica offices were pretty standard big tech office fare. Miniature “phone booth” meeting rooms raised the ire of building inspectors over ADA compliance, and the company implicitly encouraged employees to continue using the non-compliant facilities while replacements were acquired.
Understandable but an annoying situation. I don't fault anyone for using the booths even with an Out of order sign ... as a developer I would rather have someone use the booth than not use it, phone calls suck.
>The first indications that something was amiss came from just getting introduced to the project by the other engineer already working on it. After showing me the Github repo where I could check out the code, he pointed me to an enormous design document for what was, at the end of the day, not an overly complicated project. When I asked him why he’d put so much effort writing out an extensive design document for a project whose architecture would probably change significantly by the time it wrapped up, he gave me what would become an all-too-familiar reason: John insisted.
Author sounds like a hellish developer to work with. He is bouncing from "let me just stay here for 4 years and cash out" to "I know this better than anyone else". Engineering director writes big document to align everyone and this developer wants to do everything on his terms.